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LAWS OF 

THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 



B. W.' MATURIN 


if 

FORMERLY OF COWLEY ST. JOHN, OXFORD 


NEW IMPRESSION 


LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO; 
FOURTH AVENUE & 30 th STREET, NEW YORK 
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 
BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS 

1916 


H-ihil obatat. 


imjmtni pateai. 


Westmonasterii, 

die i4/«n., 1907. 



Herbertus Thurston, S.J., 

Censor deputatus. 


Gulielmus, 

Episcopus Arindelensis, 

Vicarius Generalis. 


GfF T 

FATHER G. RYAN 
AUC- ZQ, 1940 


CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

I. The Principles of the Beatitudes i 

II. Blessed are the Poor in Spirit, for Theirs is the 

Kingdom of Heaven 35 

III. Blessed are the Meek, for They Shall Inherit 

the Land 65 

IV. Blessed are They that Mourn, for They Shall be 

Comforted 91 

V. Blessed are They that Hunger and Thirst after 

Justice, for They Shall have their Fill . 117 

VI. Blessed are the Merciful, for They Shall Obtain 

Mercy . . 149 

VII. Blessed are the Clean of Heart, for They Shall 

See God 183 

VIII. Blessed are the Peacemakers, for They Shall 

be Called the Children of God . . . 215 

IX. Blessed are They that Suffer Persecution for 
Justice’ Sake, for Theirs is the Kingdom of 
Heaven 249 


v 









THE PRINCIPLES OF THE 
BEATITUDES. 


















THE PRINCIPLES OF THE BEATITUDES. 


One of the greatest achievements of the human mind 
in modern times has been the discovery that under- 
lying and controlling all the apparently disconnected 
phenomena of nature is Law. For ages the universe 
presented to men a vast panorama of constant change, 
each of its phenomena standing alone, some of these 
changes coming in orderly sequence, many of them 
apparently capricious. The silent heavens and the 
storm-swept earth, what had they to say to one 
another? The seasons marched with steady tread, 
but often indeed interrupted and held back by violent 
outbursts that betokened the presence of some angry 
God. But why the changes followed in regular sequence 
was known no more than why the sun rose and set, or 
why the wind blew from north or south. 

It has been the result of careful and patient study to 
discover that underlying and causing all the phenomena 


4 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


of Nature and governing all her actions, there is Law. 
Caprice gives way, the more we know her, to order, 
and order is the result of Law. We feel so sure of 
this now that we are certain that her most fitful moods 
and her most exceptional acts can be reduced to the 
controlling power of law. Of some of the laws as yet 
we know little or nothing, but of their existence we 
have no doubt. Indeed, so great is the change that 
has passed over the human mind within the last few 
years that it would baffle the imagination of a man 
of ordinary education to conceive of any part of the 
universe, however distant, in which Law did not reign. 
Through the length and breadth of her vast domain, into 
the minutest parts of her system, like nerves in the 
human body, run the forces that rule her alike in the 
infinitely small or in the infinitely great, and as the 
nerves convey the commands of the will, so, behind 
these forces, stands a mighty Will whose rule they 
represent and carry out. 

It is the same in the moral world. We know less of 
the laws that govern the workings of the mind and 
heart and will, but we know enough to feel confident 
that this higher and more mysterious world forms no 


THE PRINCIPLES OF THE BEATITUDES 


5 


exception to the principle of law and order that reigns 
everywhere in the physical universe. Whatever we 
may allow ourselves to think in moments of discourage- 
ment at our own failures, or at times when we seem to 
see the darker side of human life and the degradation 
of character and the triumph of evil, yet in calmer 
moments of reflection and insight we know full well 
that character is not the mere result of the accident of 
circumstances and environment, nor the product of 
the action of external forces. Within the mysterious 
world of personality Law reigns, and controls the move- 
ment of every thought, the growth of every desire, the 
development of every passion. The poor creature of 
impulse tossed hither and thither by every uncontrolled 
desire and passion, the plaything of circumstance and 
external influences, has sunk to this state, in which 
personality has become but the loose bond that holds 
together the most destructive forces, as truly under the 
control of Law as the strongest and most self-controlled. 
Did we but know these laws more accurately, we could 
analyse and define every step by which the prodigal 
falls and by which the noblest rise and grow strong. 

Yet however limited our knowledge of psychology, 


6 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


every one of us knows enough to be fully aware of the 
fact whenever we violate any of the laws of our moral 
nature. Those laws cannot be broken without a pro- 
test which vibrates throughout our whole being. The 
broken law inflicts a pain, in a way, more acute and 
more lasting than any physical pain, and it may be 
questioned whether there is any joy that is greater than 
that which suffuses the soul when for the sake of fidelity 
to the law of its moral being it makes some costly 
sacrifice. It is good no doubt to know as much as 
can be known about these laws and the method of 
their action ; it is good to understand the working of 
the machinery of our inmost being ; but our nature by 
God’s goodness is so constituted that it works, so to 
speak, automatically, and gives its clear and sharp pro- 
test against any infringement of her laws. 

And the same principle of Law reigns also in the spiri- 
tual sphere. It would be difficult to imagine that the 
God of law and order had exempted our nature from 
the government of Law in its highest operations. And 
yet there are not a few who while they are orderly and 
regular in every other department of life seem to think 
that the spiritual life is to be an exception. The proper 


THE PRINCIPLES OF THE BEATITUDES 


7 


dread of anything like mechanicalness or routine be- 
comes exaggerated into a rejection of all method, system 
or regularity in spiritual things. They refuse to lay 
down rules for prayer or the frequenting of the sacra- 
ments. They profess that their relations with God 
can be controlled by no rule and ought to be the spon- 
taneous utterance of Love, and that it is useless to try 
and force themselves to pray simply because it is the 
hour of prayer, just as much as it would be useless to 
bind themselves to certain times for conversation with 
a friend; that to force themselves to receive the sacra- 
ments because a certain day in the week or month has 
come round is to run the risk of pure formalism in the 
holiest actions of life. The soul will not rise to order, 
and if it has not risen, we had better wait till it does. 

But such arguments, while it is easy to see and respect 
the truth in them, ignore the fact that the spiritual life 
is a Life, a Life imparted to the soul, which has to 
be tended, developed, nourished, disciplined, “ The 
Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a seed which a man 
took and cast into a field and which grows by its own 
laws, first the blade, then the ear, after that the full 
corn in the ear.” This life is imparted in Baptism, 


8 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


strengthened in Confirmation, nourished in Holy Com- 
munion, healed and cleansed in the Sacrament of Pen- 
ance. As the natural life must be fed, developed and 
disciplined, if it is to attain to its full strength and 
usefulness, so must the spiritual life. And as the 
natural life, if neglected, will run to seed, so will the 
spiritual life. 

It is necessary, therefore, that there should be order 
and system in the spiritual life, as necessary as in the 
physical or intellectual. He who will only eat when he 
is hungry and eat only what he likes will soon fall into 
ill-health. And he who only studies and thinks when 
he is in the humour for it, will soon find his intellectual 
life fall into decay. And he who prays and receives 
the sacraments only when he feels drawn to it, will soon 
find his spiritual desires and vision grow weak and dim 
and uncertain and gradually die away. 

But, moreover, the necessity for this external habit 
of order and discipline is based upon the principle that 
the spiritual life is itself controlled by Law. 

There is nothing more beautiful than the infinite 
variety of the lives of the Saints. Each is a study, 
indeed we may say a revelation, in itself. There does 


THE PRINCIPLES OF THE BEATITUDES 


9 


not seem to be any fixed rule that binds them, any 
method upon which their lives are formed. Each 
stands alone, letting his life flow forth in a reckless 
torrent that is apparently controlled only by the un- 
controllable passion of love to God and love to man. 
There is a daring, a freedom and a freshness that is 
startling. A liberty that surprises, perhaps a little 
scandalises, more timid natures. The ordinary plodders 
on the well-worn path to Heaven are not prepared to 
find these Saints plunge into thickets and climb by 
unknown paths, and outstrip them by their very daring 
and their dominant individualism ; they, to all ap- 
pearance, take liberties with prescribed methods, show 
a fearlessness of the ordinary dangers that beset the 
spiritual life and exhibit a confidence in God that 
looks to timid eyes startlingly like presumption ; yet 
somehow they come out right, they succeed where 
others fail, and leave the rest of the world far behind. 

Indeed not only are the lives of the Saints marked 
by this extraordinary variety and individualism, but 
the same virtues in different men are so markedly 
different that often we can scarcely recognise them as 
the same. The zeal of St. Paul, in its inexhaustible 


10 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


energy, content with nothing short of the world as its 
sphere, and the zeal of St. John, the great contempla- 
tive, seem scarcely to have one characteristic in common. 
It would be difficult to compare the humility of St. 
Francis of Assisi with, say, the humility of St. Ignatius 
of Loyola, each gives us his own revelation of the 
same virtue, stamped deeply with his own personality. 
Or compare again the Spirit of Prayer — the very 
source and fountain of all spiritual life — as portrayed 
by St. John of the Cross and by the exercises of St. 
Ignatius. Each draws with a master’s hand, according 
to his own experience, his method of communing with 
God, and the most striking thing is their dissimilarity. 

i. And yet, with all this freedom and individualism 
the lives of the Saints did not develop by haphazard 
efforts to be good. They were not the mere result of 
individual souls trying each in his own original way to 
draw near to God. As we get beneath the surface and 
examine their lives more carefully we shall find that 
they were each and all built upon and developed under 
a system of laws as truly as the organic world of life. 
What more varied, what more apparently free than life ? 
yet it grows, develops and matures by law. So does 


THE PRINCIPLES OF THE BEATITUDES 


ii 


the spiritual life of the Saints. Law in the highest sense 
is not opposed to liberty, it is the principle upon which 
liberty is based. St. James speaks of the Christian as 
being judged by “ the perfect law of liberty”. In pro- 
portion as we violate any of the laws of our physical, 
moral or intellectual nature we lose some of our freedom 
of action ; in proportion as we know and obey their 
laws we are free. Perfect health, and vigour of mind 
and body depend upon perfect conformity to law 
And perfect spiritual liberty, the possession of the 
power of complete spiritual self-expression and action, 
depends upon perfect conformity to those laws upon 
which the spiritual life is based and by which it matures. 
The cramped and timid scrupulousness of many a 
Christian’s life is the result of the lack of the knowledge 
of or obedience to these laws. “ The Truth,” in every 
sphere, “ shall make you free.” The wonderful large- 
ness and daring, and, if I may say so, roominess, of the 
lives of the great Saints sprang from the elasticity and 
adaptableness of their individual characters when brought 
into complete response to the laws of the spiritual life. 
As the great musician handles his instrument with an 
ease and freedom that astonishes one less skilled. 


12 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


And the laws of the spiritual life, like the laws 
of the physical life, are common to all. The infinite 
variety of character is, partly at least, the result of the 
difference of material and temperament upon which 
these laws are acting. Just as the same forces in 
Nature — light, heat, electricity — produce different 
effects upon different substances. 

So in the spiritual life the fundamental laws are the 
same for all. If we could analyse the characters of 
those who have attained to the most different forms of 
sanctity, we should find notwithstanding their infinite 
variety that all were governed by the same principles. 
Take to pieces the most varied and complicated forms 
of organic life, and we shall be able to trace the growth 
and structure of all of them to a few laws common to 
all. So we may trace to the operation of the same 
spiritual laws the sanctity and hiddenness of the clois- 
tered contemplative, and the zeal of the missionary ; the 
silence of the hermit, and the fervour that inspires the 
burning eloquence of the apostolic preacher. It was the 
same principle that drove St. Anthony into the wilder- 
ness that sent St. Francis into the towns and villages 
of Italy. Under the moulding power of the same law 


THE PRINCIPLES OF THE BEATITUDES 


13 


St. Ignatius drilled and disciplined his great army of 
the Society of Jesus to deal with the cultured world of 
his day, and St. Theresa drew her daughters out of the 
world and placed them behind grills and barriers to 
plead for the world they left, and to do penance for it 
in a life hidden with Christ in God. St. Francis Xavier 
in a life of unwearied activity preaching to the heathen, 
and St. John of the Cross, or St. Peter of Alcantara, 
shutting themselves out from the world in a life of 
mystic contemplation, were very different types of men 
in many ways, and very different in the circumstances 
of their lives, yet they were the product of the self-same 
laws. 

Many no doubt have grown in holiness without any 
technical or scientific knowledge of these laws. For as 
all the forces of Nature run up into and are the expres- 
sion of the Will of God — “Creation’s secret force Him- 
self unmoved all motion’s source ” — so do all the laws of 
the spiritual life run into one great force— the love 
of God — the love of the Law-Giver. As our Lord 
summed up the Decalogue— in the love of God, “ and 
that which is like unto it,” the love of man. So, many 
a humble and unlettered Saint has instinctively and 


x 4 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


almost unconsciously learnt, in the absorbing passion of 
his love to God, to conform himself to those laws of 
the spiritual life which he could not define or analyse. 
He simply followed as the love of God led him. Yet 
if we could analyse his life and the method by which 
the virtues that adorn his character have matured and 
ripened, we could trace them to the action of those laws 
which are common to all. 

It is, I think, a great help to remember this. To 
remember that the spiritual life is not an exceptional 
department of life, dependent largely upon emotion and 
largely upon circumstances over which we have no 
control. But that it is a life, possessed by us all, 
growing and developing under laws which are made 
known to us, to which, if we will conform, the result must 
be attained. If each of us had to strive on in his own 
way, and perhaps as none ever strove before ; if holiness 
were a purely individual thing, and depended upon wild 
and random efforts to control ourselves and to draw 
near to God, we might well despair. But if, as is 
undoubtedly true, order reigns amidst all the variety of 
the spiritual world, if the spiritual life depends upon 
conformity to certain laws, and we have not to discover 


THE PRINCIPLES OF THE BEATITUDES 


i5 


these laws for ourselves, but they are revealed to us, so 
that we know them with an absolute certainty, a cer- 
tainty if possible more assured than that of the physi- 
cal world around us, inasmuch as they are revealed to 
us by God Himself, then we have but to place our- 
selves under obedience to these laws and to bring our 
life into conformity with them, and holiness is assured 
and certain. 

Let us once grasp this and it changes the whole 
aspect of life. It makes it possible for all. What an 
encouragement to one wearied out with vain efforts 
that seem to bring him no nearer to God or to give him 
more power over himself, to be told that there is a way 
which leads to life; that there are laws by obeying 
which he will grow in holiness, and that his failure 
springs from ignorance of, or lack of submission to, 
these laws. 

And these laws our Lord has given us in the open- 
ing verses of the Sermon on the Mount. He has there 
analysed in advance the Christian life of perfection and 
disclosed to us the laws that govern it. He tells us 
the secret of Beatitude. If we would gain the Beati- 
tude we must place ourselves under the law that 


i6 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


develops it. Let the law work itself out and the bless- 
ing must follow. 

Every rule therefore of self-discipline and prayer 
which individuals make for themselves should have 
some relation to these laws, they should have as their 
object the bringing of oneself more entirely under their 
control, that they may work themselves into one’s whole 
nature. The law of poverty of spirit is the key-note 
of the spiritual life. It is the first step that the soul 
must take if it would enter upon the path that leads to 
the blessings promised by our Lord. But each person 
must bring himself under obedience to the law in his 
own way. What would help one would not necessarily 
help another. For temperament, circumstances, educa- 
tion and many other things must be taken into con- 
sideration, and so with the rest. 

But the great thing is to have the law clearly before 
one. To know what one is aiming at, and the result 
that is to be expected. If a man knows that undue 
attachment to created things clouds the vision of the 
Kingdom of Heaven, and that poverty of spirit, the 
keeping oneself free and allowing none of these things 
to master him is the condition of possessing it, then he 


THE PRINCIPLES OF THE BEATITUDES 


17 


knows what he is to aim at. The issue is clear. He 
is not fighting as one that beateth the air, but his 
energies are concentrated and the struggle is definite. 
He must be left to carry out the struggle in his own way. 
There are no prescribed rules. There is no straight 
road upon which all the world can walk to Heaven. 

There is in all the teaching of our Lord a singular 
absence of detail — great principles are laid down, but 
each has to work them out for himself. But it is all- 
important that those who are striving should have 
very definitely before them what it is they are striving 
for. And the Beatitudes considered as the laws of 
perfection reveal this and make both the end, and 
the means of attaining the end, quite clear. A harsh 
asceticism may end in stripping one of everything 
in this world and giving nothing in its place, but an 
asceticism that has as its end the possession of heav- 
enly riches can be neither harsh nor fruitless. Self- 
repression, self-effacement, self-distrust, practised for no 
definite end, or on the general principle that one ought 
to annihilate oneself, often ends in making a person 
feeble and characterless and one that is generally and 

rightly annihilated by those around him ; but that self- 
2 


i8 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


conquest fought for in the name of meekness makes one 
strong and gives as its reward the possession of the earth. 
Mourning for mourning’s sake and with the funda- 
mentally fafse idea that God Almighty is more pleased 
with us when we are sad than when we are glad 
produces the grumbler, the cynic and the pessimist, 
but the mourning that looks for and will be satisfied 
with nothing but the Divine Comforter takes all the 
bitterness and gloom out of sorrow — and so on. 

In the one case men do not see what they are striving 
for, the heart, the life, the inspiring force is wanting, in 
the other case the struggle is for a definite end and 
prosecuted with unfailing purpose. The law under 
which they would place themselves stands clearly de- 
fined before their eyes. 

But so strong and so potent a factor in the struggle 
is individual character and temperament that every 
man engaged in the conflict may be fighting in a 
different way for the same end, sometimes in ways that 
seem opposite. 

For instance, one who is naturally hard and stern 
and takes a certain pleasure in dealing cruelly with 
himself, will soon learn that if he is to gain the 


THE PRINCIPLES OF THE BEATITUDES 


19 


blessing of the poor in spirit he must become gentle ; 
that Heaven does not open its doors to those who hate, 
even if the hatred be only directed against themselves 
or the material things of God’s creation. He must learn 
to deny himself for love, not hatred, and the effort to 
place himself under the law of poverty gradually but 
surely eliminates every remnant of harshness from his 
nature. 

On the other hand, one who is by nature soft and 
self-indulgent will find that he must brace himself and 
learn to be stern and unyielding with himself in the 
school of poverty. Thus two men striving for the same 
virtue and with the same ideal before them strive in 
directly opposite ways. But each knows what his aim 
is, and so he makes his own rules, and practises with a 
view to that end. 

Thus the Beatitudes keep before us the principles 
that are to rule our lives if we would follow the ex- 
ample of our Lord. If ye would be perfect, said Christ, 
follow Me, and if we would follow Him it must be not 
by a mere copying of His words and acts, but by 
ruling ourselves by the inner principles which governed 
His life. 

* 


2 


20 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


2. But again, the Beatitudes, it will be noticed, say 
nothing about sin. They command us rather to aim 
at virtue. There is a vast difference between doing 
right and not doing wrong. A person may not do 
anything very wrong and may nevertheless be quite 
colourless and characterless. Indeed it is possible that 
to do what is definitely sinful may need more character 
than simply not to do wrong. Goodness is not a 
negative but an intensely positive thing. It is energetic, 
active, strong. The very word virtue implies effort. 
Effort of the most constant and strenuous kind. There 
are no such things as negative virtues. The powers of 
our mind and body were not given us that we might 
simply keep them from mischief and hold them in 
check so that they should not harm ourselves or others. 
They were all given us for action. The tongue to 
speak, the eye to look, the hand to work, the heart to 
love, the mind to think, the will to choose. Everything 
about us speaks of an output of power. Life is to flow 
forth through mind and body. The body is the 
machinery through which the inner force is to express 
itself. The most mortified life is not a passive life. 
It is rather one in which the whole nature has been 


THE PRINCIPLES OF THE BEATITUDES 


21 


brought under the control of the will, and the will 
under obedience to God. It is the life of one who has 
died to sin that he might live to righteousness. It is 
the Resurrection life, a life in which all our powers are 
used for the very highest purposes. Mortification is a 
dying that we may live; a refraining from evil that 
we may do good. To die to evil is indeed so far as 
it goes good, but if there be no new direction into 
which the energy of life is turned, it is to be feared that 
the evil will soon regain control. The unclean spirit 
that is cast out of a man waits till he finds the house of 
the soul empty, and then “he goeth and taketh to 
him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and 
they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of 
that man is worse than the first”. The effort merely 
not to do wrong may, and often does, lead to greater 
sin. The listless, uninterested and unoccupied life is 
the most dangerous of all. It is better to be interested 
in frivolities than to be interested in nothing. Life is 
too strong merely to be held in check. For life is 
movement, and movement implies direction, and the 
moving stream that is simply held back will soon 
sweep away the barriers that restrain it with a mad and 
reckless torrent. 


22 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


Therefore the only remedy against doing evil is to 
do good. To use the gifts we have in the service of 
God, to overcome vice by virtue. There is in fact no 
intermediate state of inactivity in which having driven 
away evil we rest, before employing ourselves in doing 
good. Disease will only be overcome by health, light 
by darkness. The mind is won from wrong thoughts 
by right thoughts, the heart from the love of evil by 
learning to love good. The current of life cannot be 
stopped, it can but be directed into another channel. 

And thus the Beatitudes say nothing about sin, but 
they imply a great deal, for they are addressed to 
sinners, yet only speak of virtue. They bid the fol- 
lowers of Christ overcome evil by good. The lover of 
the world is to overcome the world by gaining posses- 
sion of a better world. The man who would gain 
power by self-assertion, is to gain a better power by 
meekness. The man of sorrows is not to sink into 
melancholy but to seek the consolation of the Divine 
Comforter. 

They all speak of a vivid, active, intense life, a clearly 
defined and positive aim, a turning from evil to do good, 
a search for happiness in right which wrong has failed 


THE PRINCIPLES OF THE BEATITUDES 


23 


to give. They utter no blessing upon negativeness. 
Even the mortification and self-discipline that they in- 
volve is lost sight of in the brilliant light of the Beati- 
tude which they promise. As St. Paul says of our 
Lord, “ For the joy that was set before Him, He 
endured the cross ” 

3. But again, this positive principle reaches further. 
It declares to us that each of these virtues has behind 
it a definite spiritual consolation which the virtue itself 
brings to the soul. As the virtue is developed it suf- 
fuses the soul with the glow of its Beatitude. In pro- 
portion as you have the spirit of poverty Heaven will 
lie open to you. Meekness will put you in possession 
of the earth from which you have turned away. Mourn- 
ing gains for you heavenly comfort. The virtue is the 
channel through which these blessings flow in upon 
the soul. 

We have the right therefore to look for these re- 
wards of virtue. We are not to fight our way through 
the trials and temptations of earth, strengthened to 
endure them only by the thought that we shall soon 
be done with them and the reward of Heaven will then 
be ours. No, we are to strive for these virtues with the 


24 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


assurance that they will bring us their own special re- 
wards here on earth. As the virtue is formed it fills 
the soul with the sweet perfume of its blessing. In 
the natural order even, virtue is its own reward ; that is 
to say in proportion as one is true to the order of nature 
one gains the blessing which order brings. The man 
who is just, prudent, temperate, will be a happier man 
than he who is not. But he who is living according to 
the principles of the supernatural order, finds amidst 
his struggles here on earth and his sufferings the 
rewards of Heaven. 

There is a natural purity that brings tranquillity of 
mind and clearness of thought and a deepening of 
affection, and there is a purity of another order that 
gives to the soul the vision of God. There is a 
poverty that gives a man power over himself and 
over others, the poverty of the man who for the sake 
of gaining strength diminishes his outward wants to 
the fewest possible, but there is a poverty that opens 
Heaven to man. But as the virtues inculcated by 
the Beatitudes are all supernatural, so are the bless- 
ings which they bring. As the soul therefore rises 
under the action of grace and prayer and develops 


THE PRINCIPLES OF THE BEATITUDES 


25 


those virtues which belong to the supernatural order, 
it will find that it has already attained a reward which 
is not of earth. 

Such a view of the happiness of the Christian life 
is very different from, and far more inspiring than, 
that which comes from the mere sense of duty which 
has been the sole principle that has ruled many. 
There are not a few who act and speak as if the 
pleasant things were always wrong and the unpleasant 
things mostly right, who feel it a reason sufficient in it- 
self for not doing a thing that they like it. Before their 
eyes there ever stretches the dreary and barren road of 
duty, encircled on all sides by the rich and fair pastures 
that are forbidden. As soon even as a duty becomes 
a pleasure they feel that it has begun to lose its value. 
Such is not the teaching of our Lord in the Beatitudes. 
He would have men realise that the pathway of virtue 
is rich with happiness, that the struggle after the virtues 
which He commands is the struggle after the truest, 
highest and most enduring form of happiness. Each 
virtue gained makes the Heaven of eternity more real 
by giving to the soul some new foretaste of the joys of 
Heaven here on earth, 


26 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


It is then no stern stoic view of duty that inspires 
the man who aims after Christian perfection, but the 
vision of the supernatural, rising before his eyes ; gifts 
of the supernatural endowing him with substantial 
blessings. There is a joy that is ever closely followed 
by the dark shadow of regret, and there is a sorrow 
that wakens the soul first to the possibility and then 
to the reality of Divine consolation. Men can face 
that sorrow with calmness as they enter beneath its 
shadow if they have the certainty that in its gloom 
they shall have the sweetest of all comforts. There 
is a self-assertion that, inconsiderate of the claims of 
others, pushes out of its path all that comes in its way 
and gains its end to find itself alone and dissatisfied ; 
and there is a gentleness that ever considers the claims 
of others more than its own, and ends by gaining all 
and more than all that it gave up, even the possession 
of the earth, while it is refreshed with the abundance 
of peace. 

The Beatitudes thus disclose to us the blessings that 
lie hidden in the rugged pathway of virtue, and bid us 
boldly and gladly face difficulties for the joy that lies 
before us. It is no stern and gloomy religion that 


THE PRINCIPLES OF THE BEATITUDES 


27 


our Lord teaches, but one full of present consolations 
and capable of kindling the noblest enthusiasm. The 
Christian whose life is all sadness, and whose only 
hope lies beyond the grave, may then be sure that there 
is something amiss in his life or in his method. We 
know upon the highest authority that though the de- 
mands upon the soul are great and ever increasing, yet 
that the blessings even in this life are still greater. 
Indeed we may go further, we may test the reality of 
the virtue by the reality of the blessing. If we have 
none of the rewards of the Beatitudes it is because we 
have not the virtues which they command. We are 
as little capable of having the blessings without the 
virtues as we are of having the virtues without the bless- 
ings. They are inseparably linked together. There- 
fore, however poor in spirit, if our poverty merely shuts 
out the comforts of earth and does not open to us any 
of the joys of Heaven, we may be sure it is not the 
poverty of which the Beatitude speaks. So if our 
mourning leaves our heart in gloom and despondency 
it is not the mourning of the Beatitude. As well might 
the student persuade himself that study which never 
brings the reward of increased knowledge or power of 


28 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


thought is real study. On the contrary, the student in 
entering upon his studies knows well that the goal 
towards which he aims is knowledge, and that every 
step of his path is blessed by an opening of the mind 
and some fresh increase of knowledge that stimulates 
and inspires him. 

So must the Christian, in the school of perfection, 
have true foretastes of the Heaven which is his aim 
in the blessings which flow out upon him in the ac- 
quisition of each virtue which fits him for it. The 
old law pointed out the curse of sin, the new law points 
out the blessings of virtue. The old law blocked the 
road to sin by a threat, the new law opens the door 
to virtue with a blessing. There are passions and 
inclinations in man’s nature that when gratified bring 
a moment’s thrill of pleasure, followed by an ever deep- 
ening misery. The old Law set up fences against the out- 
going of life in these directions, and upon these fences 
wrote stern prohibitions, and a warning that all such 
indulgences would meet with a curse. There are aspira- 
tions in man’s nature after aims far beyond its reach, 
there are ideals that haunt the mind of possibilities that 
experience seems to prove to be impossible — the Beati- 


THE PRINCIPLES OF THE BEATITUDES 


29 


tudes point the way to the realisation of these ideals. 
They mark clearly and definitely the road that must 
be trodden, and the entrance to that road being narrow 
and painful, and since human nature shrinks at the cost 
which it demands, upon these sign-posts are written 
the promises of many blessings. Men could to a 
certain extent find out for themselves the curse and 
misery of sin, but it needed Revelation to show it in 
its fulness, and it needed the sanctions of the law to 
warn men when Nature would seek a wrong outlet 
for its enjoyment. So men could find out for them- 
selves that virtue in the long run brings more lasting 
happiness than vice, but it needed the clear voice of 
Revelation, amidst the seductions of temptation, to 
substantiate and quicken this instinct, and it needed 
the Finger of God to point out clearly the pathway 
of perfection which men could not find out for them- 
selves. In a world in which riches is an almost 
unfailing source of power and an almost universal 
object of adulation, it needs something more than a 
possibility or a guess to induce a man to turn his 
back upon it all and to assure him, and himself 
to believe, that happiness lies in exactly the oppo- 


30 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


site direction. Yet this the Christian can do. He can 
do it with a certainty that is free from a doubt or a 
hesitation. He knows it upon the authority of God, 
and that authority, if he needs anything more, has been 
tested and proved by a long line of witnesses. He can 
tread the hard and barren road of self-denial and 
poverty when as yet no faintest sign of that other 
Kingdom towards which he has turned his gaze is to 
be seen upon the horizon, with calmness and certainty. 
He can strip himself of all the world holds most worth 
possessing while as yet he sees nothing of these other 
riches which faith tells him are more true and lasting, 
and face the barrenness that surrounds him, saying to 
himself, “ I do not hope , I know that I am on the road 
to true happiness”. He does not look with the eye 
of envy upon the wealth that others possess. He 
willingly and deliberately abandons all prospect of 
such possessions. The path upon which he has set 
out is clear and well defined, hard beaten with the 
footprints of a vast multitude, not one of whom has 
ever found that he was misled. 

So it is with each of the Beatitudes. They are the 
doors thrown open by the Hand of our Lord for men 


THE PRINCIPLES OF THE BEATITUDES 


3i 


to walk forth in life upon the true road to happiness 
upon which lurk no deceptions, and in the hearts of 
those who pass through these doors there are no 
doubts, no fears of deception. They cannot be deceived. 
The sign-posts which guide them at every turn are 
written by the Finger of God; others are deceived. 
Many who have believed they could find happiness in 
the attainment of wealth, or the satisfaction of their 
ambitions, or in the joys of the domestic life, have in 
the end missed their aim, and even though they may 
have gained what they set before them they have 
found- in it only restlessness and dissatisfaction. But 
those who have ruled their lives by the laws of the 
Beatitudes, have been guided by One who has never 
yet misled any one who has submitted his life to that 
divinely revealed rule. 

To many at first sight it seems as if it were 
contrary to nature. Poverty, mourning, meekness, 
persecution. But he who tries it will find that though 
it is above the power of unaided nature, it is not con- 
trary to but in strict conformity to nature. It ennobles, 
enriches, sanctifies, perfects our nature. For nature 
cannot find its final satisfaction in the things of earth. 


32 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


The Beatitudes lift man up to God and then force 
him to turn back again to the world from whose 
fascination and power he is set free, to help it and to 
bless it. They are the laws of life, not of a solitary 
ascetic living as a hermit who, if such a thing were 
possible, seeks his own sanctification regardless of the 
welfare of his brethren. No, they are the laws of life, 
of men who live and move and have their being 
amongst their fellow-creatures, who make the world 
the better and men the happier by their existence, 
who cannot ignore or forget others, who having found 
the key to happiness for themselves have found it for 
others also. The men who are fittest to live. The best 
type of men in every sense of the word and in every re- 
lation of life. The men who see time in the perspective of 
eternity, who see the creatures in the light of the Creator, 
who having gained complete mastery over themselves 
can be misled by no false ambition, who having faced 
sorrow and suffering have learned the true secret of 
courage and the true source of consolation, who possess 
the earth, not through self-assertion but by meekness, 
who in the vision of God are proof against the delusions 
and fascinations of the senses, who never intrude them- 


THE PRINCIPLES OF THE BEATITUDES 


33 


selves in the way of others, nor cross their ambitions, 
nor stimulate their envy, but go about through a 
world of strife and selfishness as peacemakers. Place 
such men in any position and they are above reproach 
or suspicion. They will ever be the strongest, the 
most fearless, the possessors of the truest liberty. 
Their nature set free from mere temporal interests and 
ambitions, devoid of selfishness, purified from the 
taint of sensuality, uplifted above the world, so as to 
take the largest and highest views of all things, is 
fittest to do the work of life in the best and noblest 
way. These are the men formed by the laws of the 
Beatitudes. They have found the key to true happi- 
ness, and they are a blessing to the world in which 
they live. 


3 








II. 

BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT, 
FOR THEIRS IS THE KINGDOM 
OF HEAVEN. 


3 












II. 

BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT, FOR 
THEIRS IS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. 

The first law of the spiritual life has to do with man’s 
relation to the manifold things with which he is daily 
in contact in the world around him. No sooner does 
consciousness awaken than he finds the outside world 
touching, pressing upon him, appealing to him in a 
thousand ways. He stands in the midst of a world 
created for him, supplied with infinite resources and 
capable of being put to various uses. He finds this 
world a captivating and alluring mystery, studying it, 
questioning it. From the very first it exercises a 
fascination upon him from which it is impossible to 
escape if he would. It has secrets to disclose that he 
longs to discover, mysteries that he cannot rest till he 
solves. It sets his mind and heart and will at work. 
It allures him on with ever-increasing hope of under- 
standing it better, keeps him waiting long for an answer 
37 


38 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


to his questions, teaches him patience, self-control, 
humility. Sometimes it opens its lips to speak, and 
with beating pulses he listens and is greeted with 
mocking silence; sometimes in a moment it flashes 
upon his mind a light that reveals secrets he has 
been waiting for years to learn. 

To some all Nature appears but the thinnest veil 
through which a mysterious Presence can be felt and 
almost seen, a vestment that clothes, half-revealing, 
half-concealing, a great Personality. A mind pierces 
through its marvellous mechanism, arresting the intel- 
lect, and calling it into close communion ; a heart throbs 
through it that sets the hearts of men vibrating in 
response. To others it is but a vast and complicated 
machinery, governed by changeless laws, self-acting, 
self-evolving ; nothing stands behind, nothing at least 
that the human mind is capable of knowing anything 
about. It presents riddles which men must set them- 
selves to solve, it is capable of being understood and 
used in the service of man, who, though evolved by 
the mechanical working of its laws and forces, and 
shaped and moulded by the things around him, and but 
the creature of yesterday, believes he is capable not 


BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT 


39 


only of understanding it, but of ruling it and using 
it in his service. 

But whatever our theories, no sooner does man 
awaken to the existence of the world around him 
than he quickly learns what an influence it has upon 
him for good or evil, that all these material things 
affect him in a most remarkable way, that in fighting 
them he grows strong, in studying them he grows 
wise, in conquering them he gains victory over him- 
self. That not only does the development of his 
mind to a large extent depend upon them, but what is 
more strange, the formation of his character. Naked 
indeed he comes from his mother’s womb, and naked 
he returns, but not as he came. He leaves the world, 
bearing upon himself eternally the marks of his con- 
flict with, or his yielding to, the influence of the material 
things with which he had to do during his sojourn upon 
earth. 

The sight of and contact with these things excites* 
our minds and hearts, forces us to think about them, 
study and use them, and they leave the whole person 
stamped with the effect of their influence. 

The history of civilisation has two sides. It tells us 


4 o 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


of development and progress in many things, of the 
steady growth in the knowledge of Nature and her 
laws ; of late years it records victory after victory in 
the sphere of physical science that has well-nigh turned 
men’s heads and made them believe that almost any- 
thing is possible. It shows how every new discovery 
is put at the service of man to make the wheels of life 
run more smoothly. It discloses the power of the 
human mind and will, seizing upon the most destruc- 
tive forces of Nature and making them the kindly 
ministers of his service. We who look on, and into 
whose hands these gifts are so generously poured, do 
not know whether to wonder most at the greatness of 
the gifts, or the energy and mental vigour, the un- 
wearied patience and perseverance of the men who 
discover them, and prepare them for our use. Cer- 
tainly the study of the sciences has developed the 
mind, and up to a certain point the characters of the 
men who have given themselves to these studies and 
have enriched the world by their gifts. 

But there is another side to the history of civilisation. 
It is undoubtedly true that in every victory which has 
been won over Nature men run the risk of a more 


BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT 


4i 


serious defeat. The intellectual victoiy of one man 
leads to the danger, to say the least, of a moral weaken- 
ing of many. For every new discovery, every new 
convenience, tends to make life more luxurious and to 
bind men more and more under the influence of ma- 
terial things, and these things tend to waken and supply 
new and often artificial wants. The child of modern 
civilisation looks back upon a civilisation that is past 
and wonders that men could have lived in such poverty 
and such meagre surroundings. Certainly if we are 
made for eternity and man’s true end is the knowledge 
and love of God, the fewer our material wants and the 
more spiritual our life the better, And we know how 
the flesh with its clamorous demands, and the spirit 
with its lofty aims, are ever in conflict one with the 
other, and that the more we give to the flesh, the less 
vigorous the spirit is likely to be ; and thus as the dis- 
coveries of science tend to make life more luxurious 
and more easy, there is the danger of its deadening 
influence upon men as spiritual beings, who are to live 
on earth as strangers and pilgrims, journeying to that 
City which hath foundations, whose Builder and Maker 
is God. 


42 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


Following therefore upon the victories of modern 
civilisation there treads an enemy more dangerous 
than any that has been overcome, who by awakening 
and satisfying our material wants binds us to the earth. 
For we scarcely realise how wealth and luxury and ease 
rob us of our truest liberty and enslave us to material 
things. In one way the modern world is greater than 
the ancient world, the poorest have a knowledge of 
Nature and a power of drawing upon her exhaustless 
resources that the old world never dreamed of, but 
with all this, the modern world has needs and require- 
ments of which our forefathers knew nothing. Our 
nature is bound by a multitude of bonds which every 
new discovery supplies. The men of the past trod 
the earth with a freer step, their wants were fewer, they 
were less entangled in material things. We talk much 
of our mastery over Nature, how we conquer and bind 
her forces to do us service, but there is another and 
a greater victory, the victory which reduces material 
wants to a minimum and leaves the heart and mind 
free for higher things. It was a great victory, as it 
has been well said, which encircled the world with the 
telegraph wires, and almost annihilated space and time, 


BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT 


43 


but who can doubt that it is a greater victory which 
enables a man to bear with fortitude and calmness the 
message borne by those wires which tells him he has 
lost everything that the world had to give him. 

The problem therefore becomes a serious one. Is 
an increase of scientific knowledge, leading as it inevit- 
ably does to an increase of luxury, and consequently 
entangling men more and more in material things, an 
evil? If science is the handmaid of civilisation, and 
civilisation means, at any rate on one side, a develop- 
ment of material comforts, is it a thing to be discouraged 
by devout Christians? Shall we boldly say, “the 
fewer our needs the better, the freer from the world 
the better, the more we look upon this earth as the 
place of our pilgrimage, and remember that it is not 
our home, but that our home lies beyond, the more 
we shall resemble Him who said, ‘ The foxes have holes 
and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man 
hath not where to lay His Head,’ and therefore let us 
discourage in every way that kind of knowledge which 
tends to make life on earth more luxurious and to 
entangle men in its snares”. 

We know well enough that this is no merely specu- 


44 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


lative consideration, it is one that presses upon every 
thoughtful Christian with increasing insistence under the 
perplexing conditions of modern life. Undoubtedly 
work, study, the struggle with Nature, develops the 
mind, hardens the muscles, and produces many excel- 
lent moral results in the men who so use their powers ; 
yet the fruits of all this labour, thought and struggle is 
undeniably materialising. I am discontented to-day 
with the discomforts of travel which a few years ago I 
should have thought luxurious. I can’t get on out of 
reach of telegraph and telephone of which our grand- 
fathers knew nothing ; a few years’ residence amidst 
the manifold conveniences of a great town utterly 
unfits me for living in the country. Every year some 
new discovery shows me the possibility of making life 
more comfortable and makes me impatient of its dis- 
comforts. Have I then the right to make use of all these 
things, having before me the example and teaching of 
our Lord ? or should I, as one who desires to follow in 
the footsteps of Him who said “ If any man will come 
after Me, let him deny himself and take up his Cross 
and follow Me,” set them all aside, and discourage that 
kind of thought and study which produces them ? 


BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT 


45 


Certainly God gave us our minds to use, and He 
gave us the earth to subdue and conquer, yet the in- 
evitable result of the use of our minds in this direction 
seems to be that it makes it more difficult, if not im- 
possible, to follow closely in the footsteps of our Lord. 
It becomes therefore a serious question for the thought- 
ful Christian what is to be his attitude personally and 
intellectually towards a great deal of what comes under 
the head of modern civilisation. 

He seems to be placed in a difficulty whatever posi- 
tion he takes. For if he sets himself in opposition to 
modern thought and development he is told that he is 
simply opposing the use of those powers of mind and 
observation which God has given us, which cannot be 
justified. If on the other hand he upholds it, he seems 
to be giving his support to a system which has proved 
itself to be the greatest power for blinding men’s 
eyes to spiritual things and making them earthly and 
material. 

How then is he to bear himself amidst the increasing 
luxury of the age in which he lives ? 

Now it would of course be very easy to answer to a 
person who put such a question, “ If you feel that these 


4 6 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


things are injurious to your spiritual life, and that your 
conscience warns you against them, then you certainly 
ought to avoid them, but there are others who do not 
feel as you do. It is a matter for each individual to 
decide for himself. What is a luxury and a danger 
to one is neither a luxury nor a danger to another ; 
you must not judge others by your own standards.” 

But such an answer is only a shirking of the real 
difficulty. It is undoubtedly true that many individ- 
uals are called to live more strict and self-denying lives 
than others, and that some are called to “ go, sell all 
that they have,” and follow literally in the footsteps of 
our Lord. But the question is not primarily one of 
individual vocation. It is, “ What is to be the attitude 
of Christians generally towards a system that undoubt- 
edly tends to make life luxurious ? Is it to be one of 
protest or of sympathy ? ” 

If, for instance, I say broadly, the whole structure of 
modern civilisation is in direct opposition to the teach- 
ing of our Lord, and every man who desires to live a 
Christian life has only one course possible, that is, to 
keep himself free from the luxuries which it accumulates 
round him, and let his life be a protest against them. 


BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT 


47 


Then the answer is obvious. “ Are we then not to use 
our minds, not to seek to discover what Nature has to 
give us, or if we do, are we not to make use of our 
discovery? Does Christianity forbid us to use the 
mental gifts which God has given us, and command, in 
many departments, life to stand still ? ” Such a ques- 
tion has only to be put to be answered in the negative. 

On the other hand, if the necessity of our position 
obliges us to look forward to the wheels of life running 
ever more and more smoothly, and if we are assured 
that every fresh discovery is almost certain to be a new 
source of comfort and luxury, is the Christian, there- 
fore, to take all these good things like every one else 
and to oil the wheels and pad the carriages that bear him 
along life’s road, without doubt or fear ? And if this 
be true, what becomes of such sayings of our Lord as, 
“If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself 
and take up his Cross and follow Me “ Every one 
that hath left houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, 
or mother, or wife, or children, for My name’s sake, 
shall receive an hundred-fold, and shall possess life 
everlasting.” 

Now the answer which is to guide the Christian’s 


4 8 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


life makes, as Christianity always does, high demands 
upon those who would be guided by it. And it is an 
answer which goes to the root of the difficulty, and is 
applicable not merely to individuals but to all. And it 
certainly does not involve its followers in a position 
which forbids them to use to the utmost the powers of 
mind which God has given them, nor on the other 
hand does it ignore but keeps to the front the fact 
that the fundamental idea of the Christian life and 
character is that of self-sacrifice and unworldliness. 

But be it remembered that the religion of Christ has 
to do with men and the formation of character, and 
that it deals with things only in so far as they affect 
character. In other words, it lays down man’s proper 
relation to things. It condemns nothing. “ All things 
are good if they are received with the Word of God, 
and with prayer.” It declares that “ God saw all that 
He had made, and behold it was very good ”. It pro- 
tests against the Manichaean idea that there is inherent 
evil in anything, or that there is anything upon the 
face of this earth that God has not created. 

Yet there is always a tendency in the human mind 
to condemn as evil those things which have ministered 


BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT 


49 


to man’s evil passions, as if the evil were in the thing 
rather than the person. But the morality lies not in 
the thing, but in the man. Many things are so associ- 
ated with evil, and almost only with evil, that they 
seem to exhale an evil atmosphere which contaminates 
those who touch them. One can readily imagine that 
the cards or dice which have been the means of ruining 
a man’s character and property, might be regarded by 
him as things bad in themselves and to be univer- 
sally condemned, yet they are as harmless as those 
which have given an hour’s rest and pleasure to a 
hard-working man. It is easy to see how stimulants 
and narcotics which have been so abused as to be the 
curse and ruin of the lives of vast multitudes should 
become so associated with moral ruin and sin in the 
minds of those who have suffered from them that a 
certain moral character is attributed to them. Yet 
these same things when used properly have been the 
means of saving health and life. It is so easy and so 
much more satisfactory to our pride to transfer the 
source of evil from ourselves to things outside of us; 
to say we were defiled, instead of, what is nearer the 

truth, we ourselves defiled what was otherwise clean. 

4 


5o 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


For the things that have been the instruments of un- 
told evil are nevertheless in themselves good. The 
fact that they have been abused by bad or weak men 
is no reason why they should not be used by good 
men. 

Yet how often do we hear sweeping condemnations 
uttered by men against some good gifts of God/because 
in their undisciplined hands they have proved a cause 
of grievous sin, and strong words of protest against 
those who use them with moderation. It is not un- 
common to hear from those who take up a crusade 
against some great evil, such as intemperance, lan- 
guage that is altogether unjustifiable, not infrequently 
unchristian. The Church has often been accused of 
being lukewarm and backward in the part she takes 
in such movements, because She cannot go to these 
extremes. She cannot condemn as evil any of God’s 
creatures, however carefully their use may need to be 
guarded. It is not from lack of zeal but from rever- 
ence for the truth. Her language must always be that 
of moderation in contrast to the extremes to which 
many are led by their enthusiasm for a cause ; and in 
the long run her attitude will be justified. It is not 


BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT 


5i 


the part of wisdom to destroy evil at the expense of 
truth. Evil can only be overcome by truth. 

So in many other cases the attitude of the Church 
has been misunderstood where she endeavours to pre- 
serve that m od eration which is necessary in preserving 
the balance between two truths that may seem at first 
sight to be in conflict. 

By the honour which she has always payed to the 
state of holy virginity she has been accused of slighting 
the married state, yet she alone amongst all Christian 
people has upheld in its fulness the dignity and in- 
dissolubility of marriage as a sacrament. She cannot 
exaggerate the dignity and sacredness of the married 
state at the expense of the other, nor in the exalted 
language which she uses of those who for the love of 
Christ give up all, does she cast any slight upon that 
which she calls the holy estate of matrimony. 

So, again, she has always condemned the principles 
of socialism and maintained the rights of possession, and 
yet she honours with special reverence the state of holy 
poverty. 

It is this perfect balance of mind, and this justice in 
maintaining to the full truths that may seem opposed, 
4 * 


52 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


which has so often exposed her to the charge of luke- 
warmness on the part of those fiery enthusiasts which 
in their zeal press one truth to the practical denial of 
another. Money has been, as St. James says, “ a root 
of all evil ”. It has fed every worst passion in the 
human heart, it has been the means of breaking the 
closest ties of friendship and of blood, it has hardened 
men’s hearts till they have almost ceased to be human. 
Yet money has been the instrument of untold acts of 
kindness and charity. The Church gives her blessing 
and protects the rights both of those who keep it and 
of those who for the love of Christ forsake all that 
they have. The thing itself is unmoral. It can be- 
come alike the instrument of good or evil in the 
hands of those who possess it. And thus the manifold 
fruits of civilisation and of luxury which many gather 
around them, till every higher aspiration of the soul 
is stupefied and deadened and the light of heaven is 
clouded ; such things are not in themselves to be con- 
demned as evil, they are God’s good gifts and are 
capable of being used in His service, and as the instru- 
ments of charity and kindness. 

It is not therefore by the condemnation of any of 


BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT 


53 


these things, or by attributing to them in themselves 
any moral value, that the Church of Christ would lead 
men in the way of perfection. It is rather by pointing 
out man’s true relationship to them, and teaching him 
that all depends upon this — that there is scarcely any 
of God’s creatures from which he cannot gain harm, 
and not one from which he cannot acquire some good ; 
that the good or evil lies not in the thing itself, but in 
him, and in his use or abuse of it. 

In one word, she teaches that man is made for God, 
and that all created things are given him as means 
to lead him to God. In so far as they are used as 
means to this end they help him on, in so far as they 
are used as an end in themselves they hold him back 
and come between him and God. All sin can be 
defined in the language of St. Paul as “ the love of 
the creature more than the Creator The entangle- 
ment of the heart in created things. 

There is scarcely anything on the face of the earth 
that cannot be abused and become a snare. There is 
nothing through which the eye of faith cannot see 
some faint revelation of the power and wisdom and 
beauty of the Creator. We are the centre of many 


54 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


wants. A fierce fire of desire burns in the depths of 
every soul. We find scattered around us by the bounti- 
ful hand of God multitudes of things ready to our hand. 
Many of these things we cannot do without. Even 
those who reduce their needs to a minimum require 
many things — the food they eat, the clothes they wear, 
the houses they dwell in. And every one of these things 
can be used as means to fit a man to do his work and 
serve God, or merely for the pleasure they give in the 
using, till, for the enjoyment of that pleasure, they are 
sought after more and more and become a means of 
enjoyment — an end in themselves, and cease to have 
any relationship to God. And thus God is lost sight of 
in the creatures which He designed as His messengers 
to call men to Him. 

Thus all that modern life puts at our disposal is, in 
itself, essentially neither good nor bad. Everything 
depends upon the way in which each individual uses it. 
The comforts and luxuries that we are accustomed to, 
and all that makes the wheels of life run smoother, do, 
no doubt, tend to make the multitudes who use these 
things without a thought of God more materialistic 
and earthly. But the same multitude, in other less 


BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT 


55 


luxurious ages, drifted away from God under the influ- 
ences that were around them at the time, making them 
savage and cruel. If the heart be not anchored in God 
it will be drawn hither and thither by the currents in 
which it finds itself, whether these currents swamp them 
in material comforts or in brutal and savage passions. 
It is not by change of surroundings that men are brought 
to God, but by a change of heart. Prohibitive legis- 
lation will never Christianise men. A man who wants 
to get drunk will not necessarily be one whit a better 
man because the law has forbidden the use of alcohol 
in the place where he lives. If his passion be not put 
under restraint it will break out in another direction. 

And men who crave for comforts and ease may be 
none the less material and earthly in their hearts 
because they cannot get them. The tramp, sleeping 
away his day under a haystack and living from hand 
to mouth upon what he can get, rather than work, 
differs little in his heart from the millionaire who lives 
for and loves the luxuries his money enables him to 
procure. The characters are pretty much alike, the 
difference lies merely in the accident of circumstances. 

It is not necessarily the luxuries that make men 


56 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


luxurious, but the earthly undisciplined heart that loves 
and craves for ease and seizes upon all that ministers 
to it. Whether or to what extent these things can be 
had, is but an accident. 

People often talk as if the poor, because they are 
poor, are unworldly, and the rich, because they are rich, 
are worldly. But such generalisations do not work out 
in fact. There are many amongst the poor whose 
hearts are filled with rage and bitterness against the 
rich and harrowed with discontent against their lot, 
and there are amongst the richest, hearts that sit very 
loose to their possessions and only long for the riches of 
God. 

Therefore accepting things as they are, nay, more, 
rejoicing in every fresh discovery and every new de- 
velopment of life as God’s good gifts to man, the devout 
Christian knows that for him all depends upon his 
using every new thing that is placed at his disposal in 
the right way, as a means to an end, not as an end in 
itself. These things that naturally tend to entangle the 
soul and to press in between it and God if used care- 
lessly can be, and as a matter of fact are, used by 
multitudes as a means of approach to God and as 


BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT 


57 


instruments in His service, and are received with thank- 
fulness and prayer. 

But no one can rise through the creatures to the 
Creator without effort on his part and the help of God 
Himself. Yet the difficulty lies within not without, in 
the heart and will, not in the external objects. He 
who is not struggling with himself and seeking the 
Divine assistance by prayer and sacraments will find it 
no easier to be spiritual in the barrenness of a desert 
than amidst all the luxuries of a most luxurious age. 
The difficulties would no doubt be of a different kind, 
but the results, so far as the spiritual life is concerned, 
would be very much the same. 

The first consideration, therefore, for any man who 
would order his life according to the Will of God, must 
be his attitude towards all these things that crowd and 
press upon him and tend to cloy and deaden the soul. 
And that attitude is clearly defined. It is laid down 
as the first Law of the spiritual life given by our Lord 
— “ Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the 
Kingdom of Heaven”. 

The Beatitude, be it observed, is not here upon the 
state of poverty as opposed to the state of riches. It 


5 « 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


is upon the poor in spirit. It is offered to all alike, 
the richest as well as the poorest. The attitude is one 
of freedom and inner independence. The man who 
has little of this world’s goods needs to put himself 
under the Law of the Beatitude as truly as the man who 
has much. He must keep his heart free from being 
dominated by the desire for possession. After all, the 
sphere touches the earth only on one point, but its 
whole weight presses and rests upon it as truly as some 
other thing which rests upon a wider base. Because a 
man has not much, it does not follow that he does not 
lavish his whole nature upon what he has just as much, 
perhaps even more, than one who possesses many 
things. 

And the rich man must keep his riches in their 
place. He must not allow them to master him, or to 
sink under their spell. He must learn at once their 
danger and their value, and discipline himself till he 
has got to estimate them at their true worth. 

Such an attitude of the soul towards the things of 
this world involves a constant vigilance, a ceaseless 
struggle with oneself, an insight that can only be gained 
by faith and preserved only by an unfailing fidelity to 


BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT 


59 


God. As our servants all these things are good and 
useful, as our masters they are tyrants. 

For, through the fall, the mind of man has become 
clouded, and the things of earth have, as it were, be- 
come opaque ; we see their beauty not as a transparency 
through which the Mind of God is reflected, but as 
things beautiful in themselves. And our nature has 
lost its balance and leans earthward. It is only as we 
regain by faith an insight into the reality of things, 
and, as we regain our balance by a constant struggle 
with ourselves, that we are able to use all things, as 
spiritual beings whose destiny is to rise through the 
creatures to the Creator. 

The first Beatitude then is tne first Law of the spiri- 
tual life, and sets man in his right position towards all 
things around him. It discloses to him the fact that 
the danger lies in himself, not in things around him. 
That all things are good, but that they can easily be 
abused and become the source of evil to him. 

It legislates for no one age and no one set of circum- 
stances. It applies no more to those living in the time 
of our Lord than to those living in the more compli- 
cated conditions of our own time. It condemns no- 


6o 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


thing. It forbids nothing. It does not look askance 
at those things which minister to the most luxurious 
lives, nor at those things which have been to many the 
occasion of sin and ruin. It looks out upon the fair 
world and repeats the words that were uttered ere man 
came to spoil the beauty of God’s work. “ God saw 
all that He had made, and behold it was very good.” 
It points man inward, and bids him become master of 
himself, and all things around him will fall into their 
place and serve him as he journeys Heavenward. “All 
things work together unto good to those who love God.” 
Creation recognises and obeys its master, when its master 
is at one with himself and its Creator. 

It would be comparatively easy if the use or posses- 
sion of certain things were forbidden to those who 
would follow the example of our Lord, but men, as 
experience shows, would soon find some way of com- 
pensating themselves for foregoing the use of what was 
prohibited, and they would, moreover, be misled as 
to the real source of the evil and suppose that it lay 
without rather than within. 

Thus man is placed, by the Beatitude, free in the 
midst of God’s creation, to have and to use what he 


BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT 


61 


will ; all things are given him for his service, but he is 
warned of his danger. He must be the master of all, 
the servant of nothing. 

And the Beatitude is a personal one. Each man 
knows where his danger lies, and what his struggle 
must be. The same thing may be a source of danger 
to one and of help to another. The moment any one 
finds that he is depending too much upon any created 
thing, the Law of the Beatitude bids him struggle with 
himself to keep it in its place. 

It would be a strange and interesting revelation of 
character if we could see into the lives of those around 
us, and learn what it is that has constituted their life 
struggle, the chief source of their discipline or failure. 

Some of us could look with calm indifference, or 
perhaps contempt, upon that which stirred the deepest 
passions in another and clouded a brilliant intellect, and 
swayed and bent a strong will into a degrading slavery. 

It is hard to imagine that a thing which we use when 
needed, and think no more about, makes the head of 
some strong man swim and his pulses beat, so that he 
cannot even think of it with calmness or reason. But 
so it is. We all have a bent towards something here 


62 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


on earth that tends to gain stronger and stronger control 
over us, “ till for its sake alone we live and move,” and 
are ready to sacrifice God, Heaven, eternity, place, 
power, influence, human affection, life itself. 

We can perhaps look back into the past and see how 
some such things came into our lives and began to claim 
more and more of our thoughts, to stir our passions and 
kindle our hearts, till we felt we must fight them or 
become their slaves. And we can perhaps remember 
how fierce, how unreasonably fierce, the fight was, and 
that we had to turn our backs upon them and refuse to 
think about or use them till the spell was broken and 
the magic of their attraction was gone, and we can now 
laugh to think that such things came so near to robbing 
us of our liberty and of God. 

An easy chair, a pleasant book, the pleasures of the 
table, have stood between many a man and a life of 
usefulness. 

Such things, in so far as they attract any of us, 
attract by offering a blessing, a happiness of some sort. 
The Beatitude of the poor in spirit offers another kind 
of happiness, the spiritual happiness that comes through 
the possession of the Kingdom of Heaven. It is not 


BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT 


63 


merely for our liberty that we are to struggle with these 
things of earth. It is that we may get something 
better, and more worth having, something that ensures 
a far deeper and more lasting happiness. We cannot 
have both. The heart that is capable of infinite expan- 
sion in the love of God and the possession of Heaven 
can contract itself to the narrow limits of the love of 
some earthly comfort It can do without God and the 
hope of Heaven, but it cannot do without an easy chair 
or a good dinner. It can do without righteousness, 
justice, truth, but it cannot do without the gratification 
of the senses. Such comforts bring no doubt their 
consolations, poor, transient and enervating as they are ; 
if they did not men would not care to have them. 

There is a Beatitude for those who set themselves to 
possess the Kingdom of earth or any or all of the things 
it has to give, but behind the Beatitude stand remorse, 
regret, failure and restless discontent. And there is a 
Beatitude for those that will not have these things, but 
in poverty of spirit fight their way to the Kingdom that 
lies hidden behind them, and become possessors of that 
Kingdom which gives to those who win it liberty and 
eternal peace. 


V 












III. 

BLESSED ARE THE MEEK, FOR 
THEY SHALL INHERIT THE 
LAND. 


J 






























































































































































































































































































































































































































































































BLESSED ARE THE MEEK, FOR THEY 
SHALL INHERIT THE LAND. 


The Christian Creed is one whole. The perfect balance 
of truths that sometimes seem opposed. God is three 
and God is one. Christ is perfect God and perfect Man. 
The life of man is absolutely dependent upon personal 
effort, and equally dependent upon the help of Divine 
Grace. All the effort is vain without the Grace of God, 
and the Grace of God is powerless without the co- 
operation of the will of man. Heresy is the over- 
statement or the understatement of truth, or the 
pressing of one truth to the neglect of some other. 
The Christian faith is like the blending in perfect 
proportion of certain chemicals, which if the proportion 
be not exact fails to produce the combination desired, 
or ends in an explosion. 

And it is the same with the Christian life, the 

more you analyse it the more wonderful you see it to 
67 5 * 


68 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


be in its sublime justice, its perfect proportions and 
its intimate cohesion. The Church is most patient of 
human weakness and sin, yet the ethical system of the 
Church is intolerant of all sin. Heathen systems were 
full of paradoxes, blending lofty ideals with shocking 
vices. They permitted virtue and vice to grow side 
by side, with their roots interlaced. But Christianity 
brought out all sin into the light, showed its ugliness 
and forbad it. No man can be a true follower of 
Jesus Christ and sin with impunity, and in ignorance 
that his sin is forbidden. St. John the Baptist’s 
prophecy of our Lord’s work was : “His fan is in His 
hand and He will thoroughly cleanse His floor, gathering 
His wheat into His barn and burning up the chaff with 
fire unquenchable”. Our Lord marked clearly and 
definitely once for all the line between right and 
wrong. He called light light and darkness darkness. 
He that offendeth against one commandment is guilty 
of all. That is, he that lives in the deliberate violation 
of one of the commandments of God destroys the 
Christian standard and produces a different type of 
character from that set before him by our Lord. The 
blending and harmonising of all the commandments 


BLESSED ARE THE MEEK 


69 


produces a perfect whole, a type unknown outside of 
the Religion of Jesus Christ. Our Lord does not set 
before us at first an imperfect standard and as we ad- 
vance a more and more perfect one. He holds before 
our eyes from the very first the standard of perfection, 
bears with our weaknesses and failures, the slowness of 
our progress, our many sins, but only that He may lead 
us, as we can follow, to the fufilment of His design. 
And thus we are led on — one step forward leads to 
another. The struggle with one sin leads us to see 
and struggle with others. As the outer coating of the 
marble is struck off by the sculptor, the rough outline 
of the figure is seen, then gradually it steps forth freed 
from all that incumbered it, instinct with beauty and with 
life. So in the Christian life one thing leads to another. 
We do not realise all that that first step involves, all 
that it commits us to. If we did we probably should 
not have the courage to take it. We see only the beauty 
of goodness, the ugliness of sin, and we long to rid 
ourselves of the chains of perhaps one sin that enslaves 
us. But we soon find that we cannot stop there, sin 
is intertwined with sin as virtue is with virtue, and we 
become quickly aware that we cannot break with this 


7o 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


dominant sin without breaking with others. The form 
of perfect goodness becomes more and more attractive 
and its light pierces deeper into the soul, revealing evil 
hitherto unknown. We find ere long that we must go 
on, or go back under the bondage we hate. As we 
were the servants of sin, there is only one way out of 
our slavery ; by submitting ourselves to a higher 
service, we must become the servants, the slaves, of 
Righteousness. We are caught in strong currents that 
bear us onward ; we must either force our way out of 
those currents, or yield ourselves to be carried where 
they will. The stream of life has as it were two 
counter-currents, one towards goodness, the other 
towards evil ; to escape from one is to find ourselves 
in the relentless clutches of the other. There is no still 
backwater where we can float about as we will. Or 
to use St. Paul’s image : Every man here on earth must 
be a slave. He cannot in fact be, as he imagines, his 
own master. He must be the servant of sin or the 

servant of Righteousness — the slave of Jesus Christ 

“ Quern servire est regnare ”. 

And thus, no sooner does a man place himself under 
the first great Law of Christian perfection— the Law of 


BLESSED ARE THE MEEK 


7i 


poverty of spirit — than he finds himself drawn under 
the force of another Law, growing out of it, and inti- 
mately connected with it — the Law of Meekness. 

The first Beatitude declares, as we have seen, the 
Law which should control man’s relationship to the 
creatures, that is, to all created things around him, and 
the circumstances in which he is placed. It may be 
a very long time indeed before he is governed by this 
Law. When he is, he will find that he is already far 
advanced in the spiritual life. But till he has begun to 
strive to see things and to act in the light which this 
Law reveals, his spiritual life cannot be said to have 
begun. Thus these material things outside of himself 
that are not, and never can be, a part of himself, become 
the occasion of a constant struggle in his own soul. 
So deeply do the things around us act upon character 
for good or evil, that the effort not only to use them 
aright but to think of them and value them aright, 
opens out possibilities and forces issues and produces 
results altogether incommensurate with the things 
themselves. The struggle with these things of earth, 
if properly conducted, becomes the means of revealing 
the first glimpses of the Kingdom of Heaven, the 


72 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


victory over them makes the soul its possessor. A 
change begins to pass over the whole character, the 
light of another world dawns upon the soul, revealing 
the things of this world in their true light, perspective 
and proportion. 

But as the conflict deepens and the Law of poverty 
of spirit effects its results, the outlines of another Law 
begin to be dimly discerned, and the soul finds itself 
passing more and more under its control. For meek- 
ness and poverty of spirit are in fact twin sisters, they 
are born together, hand in hand they ripen to maturity, 
and if poverty dies meekness cannot survive it. To- 
gether they live and together they die. The first throb 
of the life of meekness is felt with the birth pangs of 
poverty, and if the clouds of earth gather over the soul 
that once strove for poverty of spirit, and dim the light 
of the Kingdom of Heaven, meekness dies in the 
earthly atmosphere. And those things which poverty 
strengthened the soul to give up, meekness not only 
fits it to receive again, but gives back to it, to hold and 
to use in another and better way, and thus Our Lord’s 
promise is fulfilled — “ There is no man that hath left 
house or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, 


BLESSED ARE THE MEEK 


73 


or children, or lands, for My sake, and the Gospel’s, but 
he shall receive an hundred-fold now in this time For 
“ Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the land ” ; 
and long ago the Psalmist sang the same — “ The meek 
spirited shall possess the earth, and shall be refreshed 
with abundance of peace 

For in fact it is the struggle to attain poverty of 
spirit that develops the spirit of meekness. 

As we have already seen, the first Beatitude forbids 
the use of nothing, condemns nothing as in itself evil. 
It points out that the morality lies not in these created 
things, but in man alone, and that the evil which men 
seem to get from the things around them springs from 
their abuse ; from allowing them to gain the mastery 
over them. 

At first it seems to us as if we were struggling with 
the things themselves; we find various things taking 
possession of mind or heart or imagination ; they be- 
come an absorbing interest, and rouse our passions, or 
enslave the will. We live for them and cannot do with- 
out them. Then as we realise the danger, how they 
close our hearts and eyes to better things, we rise up 
to struggle with them and set ourselves free. It is a 


74 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


conflict between myself and something that is trying 
to possess and control my life. There is that thing 
and here am I ; I will not let myself yield to its attrac- 
tion. And I turn upon it to drive it forth from my 
life. To one man it seems that the great moral struggle 
of his life has been with money — not to let the love 
of money crush out the power of loving anything else ; 
to another it has been with the love of popularity ; 
to another the craving for excitement, and so on. But 
as the conflict deepens they begin to realise that in fact 
these external things are but the occasions of awaken- 
ing and intensifying the inner dualism of their own 
nature. They excite the antagonism between desire 
and conscience — conscience calls one way, these things 
awaken desires which call another way. And by de- 
grees they perceive that the fight is not between self 
and something else which is not self, but that it is 
wholly within the kingdom of the soul. I am not 
fighting as I supposed with material things, but with my 
own passions, my own desires. The things that I long 
for may be removed out of my sight, but the longing, 
or the struggle with that longing, will go on. I may 
be in absolute solitude without the possibility of acquir- 


BLESSED ARE THE MEEK 


75 


mg anything removed from my life, but this does not 
stop the thirst of my nature to possess. Indeed a man 
may be better for being able to get what he wants 
than with those unsatisfied desires eating out his heart. 

For the human soul is in fact a centre of passionate, 
unquenchable desire to possess. It cannot be satisfied 
with itself alone. The very essence of its life is the 
craving to possess what it has not or for a more com- 
plete possession of what it has. It is the fire that is 
ever consuming it, the force that lashes it into action. 
It looks out upon things above and around it and 
longs to make them its own. The heart is made for 
love and cannot rest without the love of something 
or some one, and love is never satisfied short of abso- 
lute possession. 

The structure of our whole nature shows this. The 
central fire is desire, and all the powers of our being 
are given us to see, to fight for, and to win the object 
of our desire. Quench that fire and man turns to 
ashes. There is nothing to stimulate the powers to 
action. The force that sets the whole machinery in 
motion is gone, and it can work no longer. Kindle 
the fire, let the desire be for the poorest and most 


76 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


worthless object, and the machinery is set in motion. 
The fullest activity and utmost power of the whole 
machinery of our being is brought out when the desire 
is at its height and reaches out to what is most worth 
having. If therefore a man can direct all the deepest 
and most passionate longing of his nature towards 
an object worthy of it and most difficult of attain- 
ment, it will develop him to the full. 

And this is what the soul was made for, to desire 
and attain possession of God. It is indeed the longing 
for God, known or unknown, that keeps it alive. The 
dim vision of some faint ray of Divine beauty reflected 
in His creatures, or the clearer entrancing vision of God, 
revealed to the soul in His Moral Beauty. The rest- 
less longing that drives men hither and thither, now in 
pursuit of one thing, now of another, is in fact the thirst 
for the possession of the Infinite. And wherever this 
desire exists it sets in motion all those powers with 
which man is endowed to overcome every obstacle that 
stands in his way, till he grasps and holds as his own 
what he longs for. 

“ My soul is athirst for God.” That is the cry, 
often inarticulate, that sets the world’s activities in 


BLESSED ARE THE MEEK 


77 


motion. God seen or unseen, known or unknown. Seen 
in the pure radiance of His Own Moral Beauty, or 
seen in His creation, and in the beauty of His creation 
often forgotten and lost sight of. 

If therefore the desire for God Himself be awakened 
in the soul, and it be content with nothing short of 
God, those powers with which it is endowed to gain 
possession of Him will be exercised to the utmost of 
their capacity. There is no other desire that can call 
out their strength in anything like the same degree of 
intensity. The effort to possess, and to overcome all 
obstacles in the way of possession, must be in proportion 
to the magnitude of the desire. If I desire a thing a 
little, I will not make much effort to get it, and if 
there are many difficulties in the way I will give it up. 
If I desire it more, I will make more effort. If I 
desire it with a passionate longing that cannot be 
quenched, if I know that I cannot live without it, I 
will struggle with all my might to get it, or die in the 
effort. 

But there is, in the Divine order of our nature, an 
intimate relationship between the desire that stimu- 
lates to action and the powers with which we are 


7 » 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


endowed to satisfy the desire by possession. Some 
of these powers are for defence, some of them for 
attack. If they are used to gain that which is worthy 
of their exercise and effort they grow stronger, more 
supple and more keen in the struggle, and moreover 
they do not hurt or make harsh the person that uses 
them ; on the contrary, they enrich the whole nature, 
and do not become aggressively prominent. They 
are like a soldier with his sword by his side to use it 
when he needs it, not like one with his drawn sword 
always in his hand. The arms of our warfare are used 
only in the warfare for which they are given. They 
form part of the equipment of a character that is 
pursuing its true destiny, and fall into their place. 
On the contrary, if the desire which sets them in 
action be unworthy, they recoil upon the person who 
uses them, and become blunted and injured in their 
use. The character deteriorates, the instruments of 
warfare and defence take an undue prominence, and 
make the person aggressive, pugnacious, intolerant. 

How different, for instance, is the righteous anger of 
a saint from the outbursts of temper and irritability of 
one checked or thwarted in some scheme of his own. 


BLESSED ARE THE MEEK 


79 


One is in a sense impersonal, the other is wholly 
personal. One is a virtue, the other is a vice. Yet 
the weapon used in each case is the same. Or how 
different again is the moral firmness of a good man 
who resists all persuasion to violate his conscience, and 
the dogged obstinacy of a man who is only determined 
at all costs to have his own way. One enriches, the 
other impoverishes the nature, yet the only difference 
is that in the one case the will is used for no personal 
end, in the other the end is altogether personal. 

And now we can see the intimate connection between 
the Beatitude of poverty and meekness. 

Poverty directs the soul Heavenward, bids it keep all 
created things in their place as a means to an end, not 
an end in themselves. And this involves, as we have 
seen, a strenuous and unceasing conflict, not with these 
created things, but an inward conflict with our own 
hearts to direct them towards God, and then with all 
those weapons of warfare which God has given us to 
get possession of what the heart desires, and to defend 
ourselves against the assaults of every one and every- 
thing that would hold us back. 

And this is the source of meekness. 


8o 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


Meekness is that virtue which is the outcome of the 
discipline and training of the offensive and defensive 
powers of the soul, so as to use them primarily and 
chiefly in the service of God, not for the attainment 
of earthly ends or for one’s own personal ends. Aris- 
totle defines it as “ the contrary habit to passion 
Yet there is passion in it. It is full of fire and force, 
for all the passion and fire that might be used for 
personal ends is used in the struggle to possess God. 
The passion is there, but purified, intensified and 
directed. There is no anger that cows men as the anger 
of the righteous against iniquity ; no will so strong and 
firm as the will that is wholly dominated by conscience. 
Such anger, such firmness of will, are not passionless, 
they are aglow with all the passions of our nature, for 
all can be summed up in love, and the love of God is 
love at white heat — a love that can conquer the world. 

Thus it is in the effort to gain poverty of spirit that 
meekness is born, and under its protecting arm it ripens 
to maturity. Though of gentle mien and kindly form 
it is the outcome of fierce struggle and ceaseless conflict 
with self. It is perfectly fearless, for it was born in the 
din of battle. Though gentle as a woman its nerves 


BLESSED ARE THE MEEK 


Si 


are of steel, its muscles of iron. Yielding as it seems, 
it can lead men to the martyr’s stake, and strengthen 
them to endure all the cruelty that the art of man can 
devise. Though ready to give place to others, it is not 
from indifference, but because it has set itself to attain 
what is more worthy of its possession. “ A heart of 
steel towards self, a heart of fire towards God, a heart 
of flesh towards men.” 

“Greater is he that ruleth himself than he that 
taketh a city,” and the meek man is one who holds 
himself well in hand, and directs the powers of his 
nature, which so often make for destruction, for the 
construction of his own character in the ways of God, 
and for the welfare of men. 

Meekness, if all this be true, is a very different thing 
from what it is ordinarily considered. To most people 
a meek man is a tame, colourless being, without energy, 
or spirit, or character. Not the possessor of earth, but 
the beast of burden of the earth’s possessors, one whdm 
strong men push out of their way with contempt, and to 
whom they give but scant consideration ; whose charac- 
teristics, what he has of them, are mostly negative ; who 

is yielding, plastic, self-depreciative and generally despic- 

6 


82 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


able. Our Lord utters no Beatitude we may be well 
assured upon moral cowardice and weakness ; nor as a 
matter of fact can it ever be said that any Christian 
virtue is really despicable in the eyes of men. The 
meekness which men despise is not meekness at all, 
but a wretched caricature of the great virtue which 
has as its reward the possession of the earth. The 
gentle, yielding, retiring spirit of the meek springs from 
a strong and vigorous stock, its counterfeit imitations 
spring from weakness and lack of character. One man 
withdraws from the fight because he has not the courage 
to face it, the other by a deliberate act of his own will, 
that he may husband his strength for a sterner and 
more serious battle. One man is gentle and unassertive 
because he has little to assert and no power to assert 
what little he has, the other by a splendid victory over 
a strong self-assertive nature. Some of the external 
characteristics of weakness and meekness are doubtless 
identical, but the sources from which they spring are 
as wide apart as the poles. One springs from Heaven, 
the other from the uncultivated and neglected earth of 
man’s fallen nature. 

But let the two men be tested. Let some question 


BLESSED ARE THE MEEK 


83 


arise where self-assertion or firmness in the cause of 
God and His Truth be demanded, and the two characters 
disclose themselves. And we see at once that meek- 
ness has in it no shadow of weakness, but that the 
gentleness and readiness to yield are really the outcome 
of the strength of self-control and a view of life that is 
altogether supernatural. Indeed, a weak man, in so 
far as he is weak, will never acquire the Christian virtue 
of meekness. He who has not the strength to resist 
outward pressure will not have the strength to resist the 
pressure from within. His weakness in reality springs 
from the fact that the flame of desire burns low, and 
has not the strength to set the machinery of his nature 
in motion, to work for one definite end. 

It is the strong alone, those who are naturally en- 
dowed with the gift of strength and determination, or 
those who have gained strength by faith and prayer 
and the grace of the sacraments, who will ever gain, 
beneath the heavenly light kindled by poverty of spirit, 
the strength to acquire that self-control which blossoms 
into the gentle flower of meekness. 

Those who know the truly meek are always im- 
pressed with the feeling that they could do more if they 
6 * 


84 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


would ; that they could win place and power and subdue 
the strongest, but somehow they will not. It often 
surprises their friends, not infrequently irritates them, 
they allow themselves to be misunderstood, let splendid 
opportunities of showing what mettle they are made of 
pass by. Like the di sciples of Him who said, “ Learn 
of Me, for I am meek and lowly of heart,” they cry 
out, “ If Thou be the Christ show Thyself, for no man 
doeth the works that Thou dost and himself remains 
in secret”. Those who know them feel that under- 
neath the fire is burning. That with all the gentleness 
the strength is there. That somehow the self-control 
has not been purchased at the expense of emasculation. 
It is in fact the gentleness that is a surprise rather than 
the strength, like some sweet flower growing on the 
edge of a volcano. For meekness is the virtue that 
grows out of the inner conflict with the combative and 
self-assertive powers of our nature. In proportion to 
the strength of these powers must be the conflict, and 
the consequent and evasive beauty of that virtue which 
is the outcome of the victory. 

But be it remembered that these powers are not in 
themselves bad, however great the evil they effect if 


BLESSED ARE THE MEEK 


85 


undisciplined, nor is the struggle with them in any sense 
to destroy them. They are on the contrary good, 
given us by God to carry on the warfare of life ; without 
them we could not fight our way, we should be hustled 
aside or trampled under the feet of the combatants. 
Those who have them not are, as a rule, the men who 
are failures. 

For if life be as we say a battle, then man must be 
a fighter, he must be able to defend himself and to 
attack his enemies. And if this idea of life as a battle 
be, as it certainly is in Holy Scripture and in the 
teaching of Christ, the essential idea underlying and 
interpreting all else, then the most essential part of 
man’s equipment is the offensive and defensive armour 
with which he must be endowed. And the man best 
fitted for the battle of life is the man best equipped 
with fighting weapons — independence, determination, 
strength of will, the sense of responsibility, anger, 
courage, and so on. 

Then comes the great question which every one so 
endowed must answer for himself — What does the 
battle of life mean for me ; and who are my enemies ? 
Upon the answer to that question everything depends. 


86 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


These arms were given for combat, he must use them, 
they were not meant to be hung up to rust in the 
temple of the soul, but to be used, and he can use 
them as he will and against whom he will, and for what 
purpose he pleases. 

The choice lies in fact between two causes for which 
he must fight. He can fight for himself, for his own 
advancement and his own personal ends, or he can 
fight for God — for Goodness, Justice and Truth. His 
arms are strong for either battle. He can use them to 
push aside or destroy every obstacle that stands in the 
way of his attaining the end he desires, or he can use 
them in the service of God. 

And the difference between a strong, domineering, 
ill-tempered, self-asserting man of the world, and the 
man endowed with the grace of Christian meekness, is 
that one uses his powers to fight for himself and the 
other to fight for God. 

Each of these men is equally using the arms given 
him for the battle of life, each is a fighter, neither 
of them flinches from the fray. Yet the difference in 
the effect upon the character of each cannot be con- 
cealed. In the one, self is the most prominent feature, 


BLESSED ARE THE MEEK 


87 


in the other self is almost lost sight of. In the one 
every fighting instinct is alert if self be in any way 
assailed, in the other the fighting powers are only 
aroused in the cause of God and right. In the one 
case they act almost automatically, they have practi- 
cally passed out of the hands of the person and are at 
the service of self-love. In the other they are all kept 
well in hand and under control and like a disciplined 
army obey the word of command. The one with all 
his strength and aggressive force betrays his weakness, 
he is not master of himself. The other shows the 
dignified strength of perfect self-control. He could 
use all these powers for his own purposes if he willed, 
but he does not will, he has trained himself to use them 
in the higher service of God. There is therefore no 
loss of power in weakness, there is no effort to destroy 
any of the gifts with which the soul is endowed for 
the battle of life ; on the contrary, all these gifts are 
entirely at the service of their possessor, but they are 
held in the firm grasp of a man who will never use 
them in an unworthy cause. He believes that the 
battle of life is primarily and above all things the 
battle of right against wrong, of truth against error, 


88 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


and that it is for this that he has been given these 
weapons, and he will not tarnish them by using them 
for merely personal ends. 

Meekness is thus the virtue that springs from the 
perfect control of the strongest forces of our nature, all 
held in leash, to be let loose upon the one real enemy 
of the soul, and in the one battle worth waging. It is 
a gentleness whose roots suck their nourishment from a 
soil of fire and granite. 

And such gentleness must always attract, and will 
unconsciously break down opposition and win its way 
in the end. And it fits a man above all else to be a 
ruler. 

There are those who exercise the sway of a dominant 
personality ; people yield because they are not strong 
enough to resist. And there are people who when in 
a position of authority, if it be only over a child, have 
the faculty of exercising it in a way that arouses anta- 
gonism. Many a child obeys its parent or teacher in 
a spirit of rebellious fear, many a servant hates, while 
he yields to the commands of his master. There are 
rulers who cow into submission those who are under 
them by temper and sheer force. There are men and 


BLESSED ARE THE MEEK 


89 


T 


women who win their way in the world by a reckless 
pushing aside of those who stand in their way. There 
are people to whom others yield because it is not safe 
to resist them ; they are unscrupulous in the choice of 
the weapons which they use. Such people may hold 
power and win their way, but they leave the path 
strewn with wounded hearts and maimed and injured 
lives and gathering revolt against the success of selfish- 
ness and cruelty. But these are not the real rulers of 
men, and their success in the struggle for life is the 
success of the strong animal that tears and tramples 
upon his prey. And if they live long enough they 
live into a solitary old age, full of remorse, without 
friends and without love. But there are others whom 
somehow it is a pleasure to obey. Men who never 
stir in others one feeling of jealousy or antagonism 
who seem to have the extraordinary power of making 
those who serve them feel honoured in their service, not 
degraded, who always respect the rights, and call out 
the dignity of those whom they rule. Men who never 
drive, but always win and lead, whose path through life 
leaves in its wake no bitterness or gathering revolt, 


go 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


not one who has been pushed aside or whose rights and 
aims have been unconsidered. 

And these are the born rulers of men, and they owe 
their power and their sway over others to the fact that 
in the victory over themselves they have learned to 
rule, that no one could ever accuse them of personal 
ends or unworthy motive. Single-minded, strong, self- 
controlled, gentle and always considerate, they win the 
world to their feet and receive in full measure and filled 
with tranquil joy the blessing of our Lord — “ Blessed 
are the meek, for they shall inherit the land 


IV. 

BLESSED ARE THEY THAT MOURN, 
FOR THEY SHALL BE COM- 
FORTED. 



IV. 

BLESSED ARE THEY THAT MOURN, FOR 
THEY SHALL BE COMFORTED. 

The first Beatitude lays down the Law that is to govern 
man in his relation to all the things and circumstances 
of life outside of himself. The second, the Law of 
interior self-discipline, which, beginning with the effort 
to keep himself free and unfettered, ends in endowing 
him with that interior calm and self-control, that power 
of holding himself well in hand, which are the hidden 
springs of meekness. 

The third Beatitude deals with sorrow and suffering. 
A religion that has nothing to say about these could 
scarcely be the religion for the human race, which is 
marked and scarred and seamed by their presence. 
Over its history hangs the dark shadow of sorrow, and 
suffering has ever dogged its steps, seizing now upon 
one, now another, and torturing them in its embrace. 

They are shrouded in mystery ; none know whence they 
93 


94 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


come or whither they go, and when they come they stir 
the mind with doubts and questionings that will not 
be silenced. To each new victim, as they approach, 
though their presence is ever seen and felt all around, 
they come as something new, something bewildering. 
It is one thing to see others suffer, but it is a very 
different thing to suffer oneself. The arguments and 
sympathy which we give to others in the hour of trial 
seem poor and inadequate in our own case. The clear- 
ness of vision with which we seemed to understand 
their meaning and to trace their cause, becomes blurred 
and obscured when we are ourselves their victims. 
Their presence, which tradition traces to the dawn of 
the race, comes to each new sufferer as the presence 
of a stranger, bewildering, harrowing, and moving his 
nature to its depths, disclosing every weakness or 
bringing to light unknown virtues, testing it, probing 
it, stirring up its dregs. No man really knows himself 
till he has passed beneath the lash. It is the supreme 
revelation of character. It is like the Word of God, 
spoken of in the Epistle to the Hebrews, “living, and 
effectual, and more piercing than any two-edged sword, 
and reaching unto the division of the soul and spirit, 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT MOURN 


95 


and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the 
thoughts and intents of the heart ”, It is like the fan 
upon the threshing floor separating the chaff from the 
wheat. It is the fire that tries every man’s work of 
what sort it is. It tests the foundations of character, 
whether they be wood, hay, stubble, or gold, silver, 
precious stones. Under the test of pain or sorrow, the 
edifice of many an apparently strong character has 
fallen into ruins, and many who have passed amongst 
men as weak, have come forth strong and brave. 

A religion therefore of breezy sunshine which ignores 
the presence of sorrow and suffering, or explains them 
away, or treats them as unrealities, can have little last- 
ing hold upon suffering humanity. It must have some- 
thing to tell us about these mysteries which have so 
vast and deep an influence upon our nature for good or 
evil. 

Now there are two ways in which religion may deal 
with these mysteries. 

i. It may profess to give an explanation of them 
that will be entirely satisfactory to the intellect and 
the moral sense. Many men demand passionately the 
reason of all the misery around them. It is, they feel, 


9 6 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


the mystery, the unreasonableness, the injustice or 
cruelty of it that makes it so intolerable. And no 
doubt this is partly true. We feel very differently 
towards a difficulty that is merely intellectual from one 
that is moral. We can abide patiently the issue while 
we set ourselves to work out some scientific or intel- 
lectual problem. We know in fact that impatience will 
cloud the mind. There is perhaps no characteristic of 
the great thinkers of the world that calls for admiration 
so much as the serenity and calmness of their minds 
and the unruffled patience with which they prosecute 
their studies. 

But it is very different with great moral problems. 
How can a man go on if he does not feel sure of the 
justice or the love of God ? Every step of the way is 
hampered by doubt. How can he serve a God whom 
he does not feel sure he can either trust or respect? 
How can he love a God Who holds in His Hands the 
reins of the universe and yet puts him to such torture 
of mind and body ? Either He is not Almighty or He 
is not loving in the only sense in which we understand 
the word. The same man will be calm, strong and 
patient in the study of an intellectual problem which 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT MOURN 


97 


takes years to solve, who will become angry, bitter and 
hardened before a moral difficulty. And it is not sur- 
prising that it should be so. The intellectual difficulty 
does not press upon life and character as the moral 
does. He may never be able to solve the one, but 
it has not the same issues at stake. His moral and 
spiritual life are wholly independent of its solution. 
But his whole character is hampered and held back 
by the other, for every step of its advance and de- 
velopment depends upon the relation of the soul 
to God. 

Moreover, it is undoubtedly true that it is the more 
thoughtful and earnest people who feel most keenly 
the mysteries and difficulties which beset them on all 
sides. It was Abraham of old who cried, “Wilt thou 
destroy the just with the wicked, that be far from thee, 
O Lord ? ” And the Psalmist who complained, “ I do 
see the ungodly in prosperity; they came in no mis- 
fortune like other folk, neither are they plagued like 
other men”. And in our own day, it is with the 
anxious questionings of those who feel such difficulties 
pressing between them and their faith, and who deal 
with them in the spirit of reverence, rather than with 
7 


98 LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

irreverent cavillers who criticise for criticism’s sake, 
that we are concerned. 

Religion therefore may profess to give, and may 
succeed in giving, an answer as to the meaning and 
reason of suffering that is entirely satisfactory to the 
intellect and the moral sense. It may lay the mystery 
bare and set the conscience free from any doubt as 
to the goodness and justice of God in permitting it. 
And learned men may assure the ignorant and un- 
learned that there is no reasonable ground for dis- 
turbance or complaint. Yet I think many of us would 
be surprised to find how short a way such answers 
would lead us towards peace in the hour of darkness 
and distress. 

2. But as a matter of fact the Christian religion does 
not profess to give an explanation of the mystery of 
suffering. It sets before itself a loftier task — to train 
the soul in such confidence in God’s justice and love 
that it is ready to accept the suffering that He permits 
in undisturbed peace : “ Though He slay me, yet will 
I trust in Him ”. It brings the soul into such direct 
and close personal relationship with God Himself, that 
it no longer judges, as one does a stranger, His char- 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT MOURN 


99 


acter by His actions, but as one does an intimate 
friend, His actions by His character. “I know God,” 
so it cries, “and knowing Him I do not question His 
wisdom or doubt His love, because I cannot under- 
stand the reason of all He does.” 

There are many mysteries in life which we long to 
have explained, but the office of religion is not to 
make all such mysteries clear to the understanding, 
but to remove from the heart all possible doubt as to 
the Character of God, and this can never be done by 
mere explanation, for every new difficulty would de- 
mand a new explanation ; it can only be done by 
revealing to the soul, not certain things about God, 
but God Himself. The irritation and bitterness that 
arise in men from the moral problems of life, proceed 
not from the intellect but from the heart. We demand 
a clearing of the mind, but what we really need is a 
clearing of the heart. It is not the problem that 
disturbs us, but the character of the Person who is 
responsible for the problem. And the cleansing of the 
heart from all its bitterness and anxiety must be the 
work of God Himself in His intimate intercourse with 

the soul. As we get to know Him better we learn to 

7 * 


loo 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


trust Him and to leave ourselves with confidence in 
His Hands. 

A friendship that depends upon constant explana- 
tion of everything that is not clearly understood, is not 
a friendship that can last the test of trial. Friendship 
must be based upon such personal knowledge, growing 
out of mutual affection, that doubt becomes impossible. 
In the light of character we judge action. My friend 
may do things that seem strange and call forth criti- 
cism from those who do not know him personally, but 
I, knowing the man, judge his actions differently. In- 
deed it is not the overwrought utterance of religious 
fanaticism but the sober language of intimate friend- 
ship which enabled Job to say, “Though He slay me 
yet will I trust Him”. Such words might be used in 
human relationships between two friends. 

And the Catholic Church has as its end the bringing 
of the soul into such intimate friendship with God. 
It may desire as much as any one else to see deeper 
into the mysteries of life, it may be as keen as pos- 
sible in its research, using every power at its com- 
mand to probe further, but the devout Christian is able 
to possess his soul in unruffled calm, assured that all 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT MOURN 


IOI 


he may ever know or not know can never disturb his 
confidence in God. 

Suffering and sorrow therefore, entering as they do 
so largely into the experience of mankind, and forming 
so large a part of his discipline, are dealt with by Our 
Lord at a very early stage in the spiritual life. No one 
indeed can have made any endeavour to conform him- 
self to the laws of the first two Beatitudes, without ex- 
periencing that the effort to serve Our Lord brings its 
own peculiar sufferings, in addition to those that come 
in the ordinary course of nature. The third Beatitude 
therefore deals separately with all that causes sorrow 
in life : “ Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be 
comforted 

Now it is scarcely necessary to remark that in this 
Beatitude our Lord is not uttering a blessing upon 
the spirit of pessimism or on the melancholic temper. 

There are men who are by nature pessimists, whose 
natural disposition leads them to see and to dwell upon 
the darker side of life. And there are others who are 
naturally optimists. Such dispositions have not, in 
themselves, any moral value, no more than the fact of 
having an artistic temperament. A man is no better 


102 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


because he instinctively sees the sorrows of life, than 
another is because he sees its joys. Whatever moral 
value attaches to them, springs from the effort of the 
will to overcome the faults and weaknesses that neces- 
sarily spring from any onesided and imperfect view of 
things. 

We cannot therefore suppose that this Beatitude is 
the expression of the sympathy of the man of sorrows 
with pessimism, or with men by nature melancholy. 

No doubt most of us have known what it is when 
our ears have been wearied with the frothy chatter of 
superficial optimism, in times of sorrow and distress 
to turn to the sad tones of the pessimist as being some- 
thing finer and truer. And yet in other moods we turn 
from them with anger and resentment. We feel that 
such a temper is not true. Its appearance of courage 
is deceptive and unreal, it poisons all the springs of life 
and discolours all its beauty, and often degenerates into 
discontent, cynicism and unbelief. 

There is no Beatitude on such mourning as this, it 
brings no blessing either upon the mourner himself or 
upon those with whose sorrows he would sympathise. 

Each of these dispositions indeed if schooled and 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT MOURN 


103 


disciplined has its place and its work amongst mankind. 
But only in so far as it faces facts and refuses to close 
its eyes to things as they are. The joyous nature that 
has tasted sorrow and felt the smart of pain and borne 
with courage life’s difficulties, comes out mellowed, 
purified and strengthened, his laughter has lost that 
uproarious vulgarity that is so offensive, his language 
is free from exaggeration, and filled with the strong 
tones of hope and inspiration, and he is able to cheer 
many a sad heart and lighten many a burden. And 
the man who, naturally melancholy, has forced himself 
to look for and to find life’s recompenses, and to lay 
hold of the joys that others see, and to rejoice with 
them that do rejoice, as well as to weep with them 
that weep, finds his sympathies enlarged and widened, 
and knows that he has not lost, but gained infinitely 
both in knowledge and power, not only for himself but 
for others. “ There has sprung up for him a light in 
the darkness and joyful gladness for him that is true 
of heart.” His pessimism is robbed of every element 
of exaggeration and discontent. His character has 
gained just that blending of cloud and sunshine that 
makes the whole land fertile. 


104 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


For the fact is that each of these types of character 
is merely the raw material which is capable of produc- 
ing great virtues, if disciplined and sanctified by grace, 
and, if left to itself, generates its own faults. And it is 
impossible to say that one of them is more productive 
of virtue than the other. Each has produced its Saints. 

The Beatitude therefore is uttered not upon the 
material out of which character is formed, but upon 
the men who so use the sorrows and sufferings they 
experience as to carve upon that material the design 
of God. 

We need not pride ourselves upon the fact that we 
naturally take a more joyous view of life than some 
others, or, on the other hand, that we see deeper than 
many into its sorrows. The question is rather, how 
do we take the sufferings when they come ? Do we 
let them do with us what they will, and affect us just in 
the way in which such things have a tendency to affect 
us, or do we rise up and meet them, realising that they 
cannot harm us without our own consent ? 

Now it is undoubtedly true that in our modern 
civilisation there are not a few who use all its arts and 
gifts to avoid, or escape from everything that interferes 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT MOURN 105 

with their enjoyment. They look upon pain and 
sorrow as the only real evils of life, evils to be 
avoided at all costs. They wish to see and hear of 
these things as little as possible, and if the world is 
full of them and they cannot help hearing of the 
troubles of others, they use every means in their power 
to shield themselves from their approach. They will 
quench the first smart of pain by the deadening in- 
fluence of anaesthetics, and fly from sorrow into the 
wild forgetfulness of amusement or dissipation. These 
are the chief things which they fear and dread. Their 
whole life is one constant flight from that which in 
truth cannot be avoided, or a seizing with a reckless 
disregard of consequences upon any instrument with 
which for a moment they can drive them off, till at 
last, enfeebled, demoralised and without resources their 
enemy comes in upon them like a flood and over- 
whelms them. 

For every effort to escape results at the most in 
postponing the evil day, and often the gathering tide 
sweeps away the barriers that were set against it, bear- 
ing them down with relentless force and with accumu- 
lated agony upon the helpless creature that is crushed, 


io6 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


beaten and defeated in the fearful wreckage that over- 
whelms it. 

For it is the lot of all men to meet and be tested by 
sorrow and suffering — alas ! for those who have spent 
their strength and exhausted their resources in the 
vain effort to avoid them. They have treated these 
mighty powers as their enemies, and have made them 
their enemies indeed. 

And there are others who with a morbid and un- 
healthy mind feed themselves upon their sorrows, then- 
failures, their sufferings, and revel in the luxury of 
melancholy. To some men sorrow acts as a stimulant 
and drives them forth to help the world, to others 
there is no greater source of selfishness. There are 
not a few, more commonly perhaps women than men, 
into whose lives, full of kindliness and unselfish devo- 
tion, a great sorrow has come with a deadening and 
stupefying effect, driving them in upon themselves in 
morbid and self-centred sadness. Their only wish 
henceforth is to shut themselves in with their grief. If 
in time life’s interests and possibilities begin to appeal 
to them they turn from them almost as a temptation 
to disloyalty. They make their grief a narcotic which 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT MOURN 


107 


numbs and deadens them to the claims of life and duty. 
How often too physical suffering has been the cause of 
a selfish and exacting life. There are few sights sadder 
than to see a person who once was devout and un- 
selfish fall gradually under the demoralising effects of 
ill-health, the luxuries which illness needs, little by 
little breaking down habits of self-discipline and un- 
dermining the carefully built edifice of the spiritual life, 
till the whole horizon of the soul becomes contracted 
and narrowed under the influence of an exacting 
selfishness. 

To such persons, to whichever of these classes they 
may belong, our Lord’s words must come with a 
startling surprise : “ Blessed are they that mourn, for 
they shall be comforted 

He tells the world that sorrow and suffering have 
within them the latent power of bringing to those who 
have to bear them, Beatitude— happiness. It is a 
bracing call to look their troubles in the face, to study 
them with a new interest, to stretch forth their hands 
and try if they cannot lift the dark veil that cloaks 
them, and see if the forms beneath are so cruel and 
pitiless as they seem. It makes a man pause indeed 


io8 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


in his flight from trouble when he is told that it is not 
what it seems, that it comes not to hurt but to bless, 
or if it does hurt, it is with the surgeon’s knife that 
only hurts to heal. 

And it surely is a great thing, in a world so full of 
misery, where the lot of many is cast in dark places, 
nay, where it is certain that every one will some time 
or other have to bear his share of sorrow and pain, to 
know that these things are not meaningless or useless, 
the result of fate, or of the indifference of a God who is 
too great or too far off to heed the piteous cry of His 
creatures. 

In this Beatitude our Lord declares the very opposite. 
It is not purposeless. It is not inconsistent with Love. 
It is not merely the action of blind and mindless forces. 
Suffering has a purpose. It is not only the most search- 
ing test of character, it has a revelation of its own to 
give to the soul that will receive it, a revelation which 
nothing else can give. Behind the suffering stands 
One who comes to comfort the sufferer, calling to him 
to receive such consolation as is well worth all he may 
have to bear : “ Come unto Me, all ye that labour and 
are heavy laden, and I will give you rest”. So He 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT MOURN 


109 


pleads with the soul — turn to Me and you shall learn 
what you could never learn otherwise, the gentleness, 
the sympathy and the tenderness of God towards the 
creature of His Hand. 

In human relations there is nothing like suffering to 
show us who are our friends. Some whom we trusted 
depart and leave us, others from whom we expected 
nothing, we get much. It is an experience worth a 
good deal of suffering to learn the unexpected kindness 
it draws forth. To many it has been a revelation. It 
has shown us a gentleness and sympathy in people in 
whom we least expected to find it. Many a man who 
has had the character of being hard and inconsiderate 
has, in presence of su ffering, revealed himself almost like 
a different being. There are children who have never 
known their parents, wives who have never known 
their husband till suffering came and broke through 
the reserve that concealed a deep and rich side of their 
nature, and they might have lived and died without 
ever disclosing it, if suffering had not come and forced 
them to reveal it. 

Yes, the chamber of sickness and death, the open 
grave, the shadow of an overwhelming sorrow, the 


no 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


wreck of life’s hopes and fortunes, has brought to 
many a man more joy than sorrow, for they have been 
the means of breaking down the barriers that kept two 
souls apart, and of showing to each what was hidden 
away in the depths of the other’s character, or shut in 
behind an impenetrable pride and reserve. It cannot 
be doubted that there are not a few to whom such 
sorrows have been turned into joy — the joy of finding 
light and love and sympathy where it was least expected. 
And humanly speaking nothing but the crushing hand 
of suffering could have done it. 

Suffering then, in human relations, acts as theinstru- 
ment of revealing the deepest and noblest things that 
are hidden away in human character. If there be love 
or kindness or the power of sympathy in that strong 
hard reserved man, I shall perhaps never know it unless 
some one who is near and dear to him suffers. 

And it is the same in a certain sense with God. We 
have all been taught from our childhood the attributes 
of God. We know that He is Almighty, All wise, All 
holy. We see the reflection of His Power, His Wisdom 
and His Bounty in the world that, like a picture, re- 
veals the mind of the artist ; we learn through our faith 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT MOURN 


hi 


His Character as revealed in Jesus Christ, His Love, His 
Gentleness, His Mercy. Yet many a man in the joy of 
living or in the struggle of life has very little personal 
knowledge of God and little personal relations with 
Him. He accepts what his faith teaches him, but his 
experience teaches him little or nothing. Yet what 
our faith teaches us of Him is but to open the way for 
a more intimate and personal knowledge. For there 
is the revelation that God has given to His Church, 
and there is the revelation that He gives to each indi- 
vidual soul who knows Him and loves Him. No person 
can reveal himself fully to a multitude, however sympa- 
thetic it may be. He can only show himself as he is 
to a friend. The God that rules the universe is my 
God ; in prayer and Communion I learn to know 
Him, to enter into His mind, to feel something of 
His Love. 

But there is a deeper, closer, more intimate revela- 
tion still. The revelation of God as the Comforter of 
those who suffer. The mind is so impressed with the 
thought of His greatness and power, that it is hard for 
it to grasp the deep reality of all that is revealed of 
His Character in Jesus Christ. We read how He 


112 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


wept by the grave of Lazarus, how He was moved with 
compassion at the sight of suffering, how the cry of 
sorrow was never unheard, but we scarcely realise that 
these attributes of tenderness and loving compassion 
are the attributes of the Eternal God which are being 
revealed to us. This is the Creator of all things, who 
in His strength setteth fast the mountains and is girded 
about with power, who sheds tears of sympathy over 
the grave of Lazarus. 

It is to those who lie under the shadow of suffering 
to whom all this becomes a reality ; if they will turn to 
Him and open to Him their grief they get to know 
another side of the Character of God — not His power 
and might, but His pity and compassion, His tender- 
ness and sympathy. It is as though we knew some 
strong man in public life, who could control the multi- 
tude by his sheer force of character, and whose clear 
intellect and strong will bore down before it all opposi- 
tion, a man who was mainly known to the world for his 
indomitable strength, and we were to see such a man by 
the bedside of his dying child, tender as a woman, all 
his strength and force for the moment lost sight of in 
the utmost gentleness and love. It would be a revela- 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT MOURN 


ii3 


tion ; we should feel that we had never really known 
the man before. 

And so it is with God : on weary beds of sickness, 
through feverish nights of suffering, in hours of dark 
despair, to men and women from whom the world has 
turned with scorn, in homes of grinding poverty, He has 
come and shown what manner of Being He is. It 
has been amidst strange surroundings of misery and 
shame that some have learnt to know God as they never 
knew Him before. The sense of solitude and helpless- 
ness, the consciousness of utter weakness, drives the soul 
to turn to some one, and finding no human help it turns 
to God, and feels that it was worth all it had to suffer 
to gain such consolation and such a revelation. 

There is a knowledge of God therefore that we can 
get only upon the condition of suffering. Those, if 
there be such, who have never suffered will never attain 
this knowledge. Those who have never wept will 
never know what it is for God to wipe away all tears 
from their eyes. Those who try to steel themselves 
not to feel, or school themselves to indifference, are 
closing the door against a great blessing and a great 

revelation. Our religion is not meant to make us less 
8 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


114 


sensitive to the many trials and sorrows of life ; it 
makes the heart more sensitive, for it makes our whole 
nature more refined. It lays it open rather to greater 
possibilities of suffering. A religious man will not feel 
less but perhaps more than an irreligious man the un- 
kindness and misunderstandings of those about him. 
His religion in proportion as it is real will not blunt 
his nerves, nor harden his heart, nor deaden his senses, 
but the reverse. He will feel more keenly than any 
other man the sorrows of life. Our Lord was not in- 
different to the cruelty and injustice with which He was 
treated ; He felt it more than we can perhaps imagine, 
because of the intense delicacy and refinement of His 
nature. But our religion forbids us to brood in bitter- 
ness over what we have to endure, or to set our face like 
steel and harden ourselves to feel it less ; it bids us 
turn to God for consolation and strength. It teaches us 
that there is One into whose Ear we may pour out our 
complaints without fear of bitterness or hardness, and 
He will teach us how to be at once sensitive and gentle 
and strong. The Beatitude is for the mourners; 
not for those who have risen above or sunk below 
the power of mourning, but for those who still can 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT MOURN 


ii5 


feel the smart of suffering, the wounds inflicted by 
others. 

“ Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be com- 
forted. M In the light of these words the world looks 
different. The troubles of life that harden so many, 
and crush so many more, have the power of raising 
hose who meet them aright into a state of Beatitude 
in the intimate companionship of One who can turn 
their sorrow into joy. They bring to those who will 
receive it a knowledge of God that nothing else can 
bring. To them God is no longer merely the imper- 
sonation of strength and wisdom and power, but of 
gentleness and sympathy and love. 

Such persons do not indeed gain any clearer know- 
ledge of the mystery of suffering — why it is permitted 
or what is its cause — but they do better, they reap its 
fruits, and with unruffled calm and strong confidence 
endure the sufferings that are their lot. 


V 

BLESSED ARETHEY THATHUNGER 
AND THIRST AFTER JUSTICE, 
FOR THEY SHALL HAVE THEIR 
FILL. 














V. 

BLESSED ARE THEY THAT HUNGER AND 
THIRST AFTER JUSTICE, FOR THEY 
SHALL HAVE THEIR FILL. 

The Catholic faith unquestionably develops in the soul 
that is true to its teaching a sense of sin and the need 
of penitence and self-sacrifice such as is known in no 
other form of Christianity. She holds up in her great 
religious orders the highest standard of virtue and con- 
secration, and in her doctrine of Purgatory and Indul- 
gences she keeps before the minds of her children the 
consequences of sin even to the penitent. Forgive- 
ness does not restore the penitent to the same position 
as the innocent ; the temporal consequences of sin must 
be endured either in this life or the next before the 
soul can be admitted to the vision of God. The life of 
man on earth must be the life of penitence. And yet 
there is no religion so full of joyousness and brightness 

119 


120 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


as the Catholic Church. All who witness its effects 
upon her children feel this ; many wonder at, many 
are even disedified by it. It is one of the first things 
that strikes those who have entered it after experienc- 
ing some other imperfect form of Christianity. Every 
other religion, at least in the Western world, is over- 
shadowed by a more or less developed form of the 
dark creed of Calvin. Life is dark enough and hard 
enough as it is ; the Catholic faith floods it with light 
and joy and hope. It impresses at once to the full the 
sterner side of religion, and its power of bringing joy- 
ousness and peace. 

It is the enemy of morbidness and scruple, which 
haunt the footsteps of so many who are striving to be 
good. 

Now the first three Beatitudes which we have been 
considering have, undoubtedly, taken simply as they 
were uttered, a tendency to produce morbidness and 
introspection. There does not seem to be much light 
or brightness in a life based upon the spirit of poverty, 
meekness and mourning. Take them as they are 
meant to be, the foundations of the spiritual life, and 
take them alone, and what could the result be but a 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT HUNGER 


121 


piteously sad and disconsolate character, uncongenial, 
morbid and joyless. 

Therefore they have to be tested, to make quite 
sure before the soul goes farther on its way and can 
fulfil its work as the teacher of mercy, the peacemaker, 
the one who can rightly and healthily endure persecu- 
tion, whether these first Beatitudes have produced 
any taint of morbidness or an unhealthy view of life 
and the world. 

And the test is the fourth Beatitude — “ Blessed are 
they that hunger and thirst after justice ” Has the 
soul preserved a good healthy appetite for spiritual 
things? Till it has passed this test it cannot go on; 
there is something amiss in its poverty or meekness 
or mourning, and it cannot develop under the laws of 
the other Beatitudes. A man cannot be very seriously 
ill, physically, who has a healthy appetite for his food, 
neither can one be spiritually far wrong whose appetite 
for spiritual things is normal and healthy ; and on the 
other hand, if the spiritual appetite fail, or is in any 
way abnormal, it may be taken for granted that some- 
thing is amiss. 

Now it is worth noticing that in that compendium of 


122 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


the devotional life given by our Lord, the Lord’s Prayer, 
there is a petition which corresponds both in its char- 
acter and position with this Beatitude. 

There are first the three petitions which turn the 
soul directly to God and place it in the right attitude 
to receive His gifts — “ Hallowed be Thy name, ” “ Thy 
Kingdom come,” “ Thy will be done Then there are 
the last three petitions for the three great needs of the 
soul itself, forgiveness, protection and deliverance, and 
the fourth, like the fourth Beatitude, has to do with 
food — “Give us this day our daily bread”. It is the 
central petition, balancing the other three on either 
side. It is in the devotional life what the Beatitude 
is in the spiritual. The test of the soul’s health, the 
prayer that it may receive its food from the Hand of 
God, and consequently that it may not feed upon any 
food which does not come from His Hand. So with 
the Beatitude, Blessed are they whose spiritual appe- 
tite has not been destroyed by overfeeding upon earthly 
or heavenly things, or whose spiritual efforts have not 
been so unwisely or unhealthily made as to interfere 
with its hunger and thirst after God. It, in fact, as 
we shall see, controls and regulates the feeding of 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT HUNGER 


123 


man’s whole nature, body and soul, in such a manner 
that the spiritual life takes its proper place and has 
room for its due and healthy development. 

Now God did not leave man to discover for himself 
the law that was to control him in the choice of his 
food, and in the order in which he was to feed the 
different parts of his complex nature. His nature is 
threefold, body, soul and mind, or at least it may be so 
considered for practical purposes, and the life and health 
of each of these depends upon its feeding upon healthy 
food, and the health of the whole person depends upon 
these different parts being fed in due order and with 
proper consideration for the rest. The body will die 
if it be not fed, and mind and soul equally need 
nourishment ; if the mind never studies or disciplines 
itself to think, its powers soon die of atrophy, and if 
the soul takes no spiritual food, never turns to God in 
prayer and faith, it will die. 

In the Garden of Eden God laid down for man, at 
the very start of his life, the law of food ; and history 
shows us that upon obedience to that law depends his 
well-being. 

For his body there were all the trees of the garden 


124 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


of which he might freely eat ; for his soul there was the 
tree of life in the midst of the garden. But there was 
another tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and 
evil, and of this God said to him, “ Thou shalt not touch 
it or eat it, for in the day in which thou eatest of it 
thou shalt die the death The tree of the knowledge 
of good and evil appealed to the mind, the intellect. 
It contained a mystery which could be solved by par- 
taking of its fruits. Hitherto man only knew good ; 
the fruit of this tree would give him the knowledge of 
good and evil. At the base of the human mind there 
lies the desire to know, the source of all progress, lash- 
ing the mental powers on to probe and search and 
examine. It may sink down to the mere curiosity of 
the village gossip; it may rise to the longing of the 
saint to know God ; it may be used or abused, but there 
it is, the force that sets the powers of the mind 
working and keeps them awake. And needless to say 
this desire is not in itself wrong ; on the contrary, it is 
God-given and good, part of the equipment of man’s 
nature for life. 

In this desire to know lay the danger to man in his 
unfallen state, and the tree of the knowledge of good 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT HUNGER 


125 


and evil objectively appealed to him to gratify the de- 
sire in a way that was forbidden by God. This con- 
stituted his temptation. And we know the result. He 
plucked of the fruit and ate. He overturned the order 
of nature and fed the mind to the detriment of his 
highest spiritual interests. He put the satisfaction of 
his intellectual hunger and thirst after knowledge be- 
fore the hunger and thirst of his soul for God. He 
sacrificed himself and his best interests to the desires 
of one part of his nature. The intellect and mental 
powers have their office and place in the development 
of man’s personal life, but it is the height of folly to 
sacrifice his personal welfare to any part of himself, and 
this he did. He was ready to feed his intellect and 
satisfy his desire to know at all costs. He found, alas ! 
too late, that the cost was heavier than he had antici- 
pated. It was the loss of the indwelling Presence of 
God, and the loss of that interior union and co-opera- 
tion of all his powers to lead him to God. He was no 
longer at one with God, nor at one with himself. The 
flesh began to lust against the spirit and the spirit 
against the flesh. The Divine order of his nature was 
overthrown and the lower parts began to assert their 


126 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


demands against the higher. The powers and passions, 
broken loose from the restraining presence of God, 
seemed as it were to gain a life of their own, and to 
live for their own ends, not for the well-being of the 
person who possessed them. Fallen man found himself 
no longer able to control or hold together the mani- 
fold powers that once co-operated throughout the vast 
empire of his being. He had by his own act broken 
up this inner unity, never in this life to regain it again 
in its fulness. 

And this, which has laid human nature open to all 
sorts of degrading vices, and made it oftentimes the 
slave of ungoverned passions, was the result, not of 
some gross carnal sin, but of failing to exercise the law 
of self-restraint in the matter of feeding the mind. 
The intellectual life considered as the only* real life 
and separated from the rest of man’s nature as if it 
were the whole of it, a thing to live for and sacrifice 
everything else for, may lead to the most unexpected 
and humiliating results. The intellectual life, as truly 
as the physical life, must be lived in subordination to 
man’s highest interest and true end, which is that of a 
spiritual being living for God. To consider mental 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT HUNGER 


127 


growth and development, in the ordinary meaning of 
the terms, as the end and aim of man’s life, is to 
overturn the order of Nature. He who feeds his 
mind at the expense of his spirit must abide by the 
consequences, and the consequences will not be that he 
shall be filled, but that he, his truest self, shall find too 
late a hunger of his nature that no earthly knowledge 
can satisfy. 

The law of food then laid down by God at the 
beginning of human life, even before the fall, was that 
man must practise self-denial and self-restraint in the 
feeding of that part of his nature whose appetites are 
most strongly felt and which if left to itself would feed 
itself at the expense of his higher nature, in fact at the 
expense of the welfare of the person. 

The danger to unfallen man lay, not in the body, but 
in the mind. The body had not yet broken loose from 
the government of reason and conscience, the indwell- 
ing presence of God held body and soul in perfect 
balance. But the longing of the mind to know more 
and more, which, as we have seen, is an integral part of 
our nature and in itself good, laid man open to the 
temptation to search for knowledge where it was for- 


128 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


bidden, and to refuse to accept the limitations placed 
upon it by the Divine command. That which is in- 
deed one of the greatest sources of man’s strength, 
considered merely as an intellectual being, became the 
source of all his weakness as a moral and spiritual 
being. 

And that primary law given in Eden before the fall 
remains the law of man’s food throughout his whole 
earthly life. Every one must practise self-denial in 
feeding some part of his nature, often indeed not merely 
self-denial but a rigorous fast, if he would duly develop 
his whole person. Each one knows for himself where 
that self-denial needs to be practised. What is a danger 
to one is no danger at all to another. One needs strict 
self-denial with the body, another with the mind, an- 
other with the heart. 

But since the fall and the consequent loss of union 
and co-operation of all the parts of our nature working 
together for the development and perfection of the 
person, the law of fasting and self-denial reaches still 
further. 

It is impossible to satisfy all the desires of our 
nature, for they run in different, often in directly oppo- 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT HUNGER 


129 


site ways. To satisfy the desires of one part necessi- 
tates the refusal to satisfy those of another. “ The 
flesh lusteth against the spirit and the spirit against 
the flesh, so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.” 
Consequently, even apart from religion, there is no 
man living who sets himself to do anything with his 
life, even if it be merely to live for the enjoyment of the 
body, except he is prepared to fast. Each of us must 
choose for ourselves what we shall live for, and with 
that choice there necessarily follows the law of fasting 
and self-denial. One man decides that the intellectual 
life is the only life worth living, he will live the life of 
thought and study, and forthwith he finds that there 
are within him desires that reach upward and down- 
ward that stand in his way. He must refuse to yield 
to them if he will live wholly and to the full the 
life he has chosen. There are desires of the flesh 
which if satisfied cloud the intellect. There are de- 
sires of the spirit which curb and check him in many 
ways. He learns quickly that he cannot live the 
life he has chosen unless he is prepared to practise 
a rigorous self-denial both of the body and of the 
spirit. 


9 


130 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


Or another ridicules the idea of all self-denial, and 
says the only thing worth living for is the enjoyment 
that comes through the indulgence of the senses and 
of the flesh. But he forgets that he is not a mere 
animal. Other desires rise and clamour for satisfac- 
tion whether he will it or not. There are moments 
when the flesh palls and conscience cries aloud for 
better things, or the mind, drugged and stupefied, 
awakens and craves for food. Indeed there is no 
life that is lived under stricter and more exacting 
rules of self-denial than that of the sensualist or 
pleasure seeker, albeit the fasting is a fast from all 
that is best worth having and against all the laws 
of reason. 

The Christian law of fasting thus merely sets before 
the world that, fasting being a necessary law of our 
nature under its present conditions, reason and con- 
science demand that the fasting should be reasonable, 
the denial to satisfy the desires of any part of our 
nature whose demands are in antagonism to our truest, 
that is our personal and spiritual, development. It is 
folly to sacrifice a life-long advantage for a moment’s 
pleasure. It is greater folly to sacrifice eternal enjoy- 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT HUNGER 


131 

ment for temporary pleasures. It is folly to sacrifice 
the enjoyments of the mind for those of the body, still 
greater to sacrifice spiritual joys and the power of 
entering into them for either. The Christian law of 
food therefore merely bids us live according to the 
dictates of reason. And the Beatitude formulates this 
law in assuring us of the happiness it ensures — 
“ Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice, 
for they shall have their fill ”. 

But again. No sooner had Adam fallen than he was 
driven forth from the Paradise of Peace into a world 
of conflict and struggle. Indeed he could no longer 
have stayed there. The environment suited to the 
development of unfallen man was in no way suited 
to him in his fallen condition. His nature in a state of 
inner conflict and strife needed to meet the difficulties 
of the outer world, that in fighting them he might 
gain power over himself, in conquering them he might 
gain the victory over himself. 

Yet so great was the contrast, both inward and out- 
ward, with the past, that there was the danger of des- 
pair. He had failed in the days of his innocence, 
what hope could he have for the future now that he 


132 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


had fallen. The light that shone within was as the 
dimmest twilight compared with the radiant glory 
that illuminated every faculty of his soul from the 
indwelling presence of God ; and the loss of that clear 
light within changed the appearance of external things 
— they deceived him. He no longer possessed that in- 
tuitive knowledge of their meaning and their end that 
once was his. This poor exile at war with himself 
found himself amidst surroundings and forces that 
seemed arrayed against him for his ruin. No wonder 
then if filled with despair he cried, “ It is better for me 
to die than to live But then the cravings of hunger 
came upon him, and the instinct of self-preservation 
bid him arise and struggle for food, and the kindly 
earth responded to his touch. And as he worked his 
nature woke from its stupor and despair, he saw pos- 
sibilities within himself and in the world around him 
unfolding before him, and as he beheld the fruits of his 
labour in a changing world and a kindling mind, he 
would recall those words of God ere he was cast out 
of Eden, words that seemed harsh and that spoke as 
of a penalty, but which now he knew to be the remedy 
against listlessness and despair, the power that alone 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT HUNGER 


133 


could give him interest and hope in the hour of dark- 
ness. God had said, “In the sweat of thy face shalt 
thou eat bread Knowing man better than he knew 
himself, and the dangers that beset him on all sides, 
God bound together for fallen man the law of food 
and of labour — If you will not work you cannot eat, 
if you do not eat you must die. 

And the necessity to work for one’s living has been 
the remedy for many an evil, the means of revealing 
to multitudes dormant powers and unknown gifts — a 
veritable blessing to the human race. For God’s 
punishments here on earth are never merely penal, 
they are remedial, and many who have murmured 
against the lot that forced them to work so hard to 
keep body and soul together little knew how necessary 
the lash of hunger was, to discover to themselves their 
powers and make them give them to the world. It is 
under the stimulating influence of work that timidity 
and morbid self-distrust are overcome and the cloud 
of dark despair lifts and rolls away. No one knows 
what is in him till he tries, and many would never try 
if they were not forced to. 

But the law, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat 


134 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


bread,” applies not merely to the food of the body, 
but to the food of mind and spirit. You cannot feed 
your mind, in the true sense of the word, without labour, 
nor can you feed your soul. 

What labour it has cost the human mind to separate 
the true from the false in that mixed condition of 
things consequent upon eating of the tree of the 
knowledge of good and evil. Truth seems often en- 
tangled in a mesh of falsehood. The wheat wrapped 
up in the chaff, light and darkness so mingled that we 
live in a land of twilight, through which here and there 
some bright points of truth make themselves seen. 
The outward appearance of things deceives us. What 
labour it has cost us to learn to know things as they 
are, instead of as they seem. And not one atom of 
truth has been given the human race to feed upon save 
at the cost of long and wearisome mental labour, and 
in obedience to the law, “ In the sweat of thy face 
shalt thou eat bread”. It is as true of the mind as 
of the body, “If a man will not work neither shall 
he eat ”. Only that knowledge which we have 
gained for ourselves or made our own by hard 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT HUNGER 


135 


mental work can really feed so as to nourish and 
develop the mind. 

And it is true equally of the spirit. We cannot feed 
our souls with spiritual food save at the cost of labour. 
The Divine authority with which the Church teaches 
us the Truths of Revelation is not meant to save us the 
trouble of thinking for ourselves, those truths will only 
have a life-giving power of nourishment for the in- 
dividual in so far as he has made them his own by 
painstaking thought and by the spiritual exercise of 
faith. He who labours hardest and exercises himself 
most in the spiritual conflict will feed with most satis- 
faction on the Bread of Life. Often no doubt the 
failure to receive grace proportionate to our frequent 
communions results from lack of appetite, through lack of 
exercise. Even, therefore, in regard to the Heavenly 
food of our Lord’s Body, the law laid down in Eden 
for fallen men applies, “ In the sweat of Thy face shalt 
thou eat bread ”. 

These two laws then in regard to food were laid 
down for man by God Himself, the first at the very 
beginning of his life — the law of self-denial. The 
second at the beginning of his new life, and as he 


136 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


entered upon all those conditions both outward and 
inward which resulted from the fall — the law of 
labour. 

But there was yet another. As the human race 
spread and developed, “God seeing that the wicked- 
ness of men was great in the earth, and that all the 
thoughts of their hearts were bent upon evil continu- 
ally, it repented Him that He had made man,” and 
He sent the flood to punish and to purify the earth. 
And as Noe came forth upon the new world, God 
said to him : “ Increase, and multiply, and fill the 
earth. And let the fear of you, and the dread of 
you, be upon every beast of the earth, and upon 
every fowl of the air, upon all that moves upon 
the earth: all the fishes of the sea are delivered 
into your hand. Every thing that moveth and liveth 
shall be meat for you: even as the green herb have 
I delivered them all to you : saving that flesh with 
blood ye shall not eat.” “The blood ye shall pour 
out upon the earth like water.” 

By the act of disobedience man had fallen under the 
penalty of which God had forewarned him, “In the 
day ye eat thereof ye shall die the death He had 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT HUNGER 


137 


lost that great gift, the crown of original justice — 
the indwelling Presence of God. Compared with what 
he had been, even in the long years of his life of 
penance, he was dead. The glory of his life had de- 
parted from him. And he was reminded of this in 
the new life which he was about to start after the flood. 
“ The blood which is the life thou shalt not eat.” He 
must never forget his loss, he must wait and pray for 
the restoration of the gift which he had forfeited through 
eating what was forbidden. He must not eat the 
blood which is the life, and as he poured it out upon 
the earth he would be reminded of his sin and punish- 
ment, “ In the day that ye eat thereof ye shall die the 
death ”, It does not always follow that people under- 
stand the meaning and reason of God’s commands; 
some of them we shall perhaps never understand. 
But God’s commands, we may feel sure, are not only 
reasonable, but have the power of effecting their pur- 
pose in those who devoutly and humbly obey them, 
even though they do not understand them. The 
law was the pedagogue to bring men unto Christ. 
Those who obeyed it in the spirit of faith were 
trained, unconsciously to themselves, in methods of 


138 LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

life and thought which led them in fact to Christ 
They did not understand its purpose, nor could they 
possibly understand it as yet, but God knew His 
own purpose and the best way to effect it, and He 
placed them under these commands that they might 
be trained. 

So with the command to pour out the blood upon 
the earth. No doubt in time the reason for the com- 
mand would be forgotten, if it was ever understood, 
but taken with the system of the law, entering as it 
did into their daily life as a Divine command, it would 
create, or at least help to preserve, the impression of a 
life lost that was to be restored, and to stimulate their 
hope for the coming of the Messias who should restore 
all things. 

These three laws with the moral and spiritual 
principles that underlay them, and which were to be 
produced by them, were laid down by God for His 
people from the Fall to the Incarnation. 

Then on the eve of the Passion as He sat with His 
disciples at the last supper, He took bread and broke 
it and said, “ This is My Body,” and He took wine 
and poured it out saying, “ This is My Blood of the 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT HUNGER 


139 


new Covenant which shall be shed for you and for many 
unto the remission of sins ; drink ye all of it And 
His disciples, brought up as they had been under the 
law, would have looked amazed. Drink the Blood. 
Why, the Blood is the life, and the law forbade them 
to drink it. But the time had come; the years of 
waiting were at an end. The woman’s seed was there 
to give back in all its fulness the life that had been 
forfeited by disobedience. “ For this is the testimony 
that God hath given unto us eternal life, and this Life 
is in His Son ; He that hath the Son hath Life, and 
He that hath not the Son hath not Life.” “ Except 
therefore ye eat My flesh and drink My blood, ye 
have no life in you.” Regenerate man received that 
indwelling Presence of God to heal the wounds and 
mend the disorders consequent upon the Fall, and 
the blood of the second Adam shed and given to 
him was at once to nourish and remind him of that 
new life. 


O wondrous Love, that Flesh and Blood 
Which did in Adam fail, 

Should strive afresh against the foe, 
Should strive and should prevail. 


140 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


And that a greater gift than grace 
Should flesh and blood refine — 

God’s Presence and His very Self 
And Essence all Divine. 

Thus, in Christ, man received in its fulness the life 
that he had lost, and he had the Bread from Heaven 
for his spiritual food, and found on earth the food for 
mind and body. 

But the feeding of this threefold nature still re- 
mained, as we know well, under the two laws of self- 
denial and labour. 

Now the bodily, mental and spiritual life is the life 
of one and the same person. It is my body, my mind, 
my spirit. The food enters into and nourishes or 
injures the person through any one of these channels. 
The food of the body does not affect merely the body, 
it affects the whole Being ; and so with that of mind and 
spirit. The material food which I take upon my lips 
can cloud my mind, dethrone my reason, dishonour 
and degrade my soul. How strange it seems that a 
material thing entering as food into one’s system can 
have such effects upon that part of our nature which 
is not material. Here is one who has become utterly 
unreliable, whose word or promise no one can depend 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT HUNGER 141 

upon, whose moral sense is warped, through the habit 
of taking drugs. It has run right through every de- 
partment of the life of the whole person, leaving the 
stamp of dishonour and shame on all, degrading the 
whole man’s life. 

Or again, the food upon which the mind is fed 
affects not only the mind but the body and the soul. 
What more evanescent and immaterial than thought ? 
Yet thought can affect the bodily health. A healthy 
mind will produce a healthy body — at least it tends 
to do so — and unhealthy thought can ruin the bodily 
health. Many a man with shattered nerves and 
weakened frame has been told by his physician that 
the cause of his disease and its remedy lies in his own 
hands, he can do nothing for him unless he can learn 
to discipline his mind and not to allow it to feed upon 
unhealthy food. The thoughts of the mind run, as it 
were, upward and downward, and strengthen or relax 
the fibre of the spiritual and physical life. Indeed the 
very flesh of a man of middle life is stamped and 
seamed and furrowed by his habits of thought, more 
perhaps even than by physical acts. Often even the 


I 4 2 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


carriage and bearing of the bodily frame indicates the 
character of the thoughts. 

And again, the food of the spiritual life affects both 
body and mind ; unhealthy spiritual food has not rarely 
led to a morbid spiritual life, and an overstrain of mind 
and body, scruples, morbidness, despair. Many when 
they have been led by a wise spiritual guide to change 
their spiritual food to a more bracing and nourishing 
diet, have found that it has given them a more vigorous 
life of body and of mind. False or imperfect religious 
systems are not unknown to have ruined the health, 
both mental and physical, of not a few. For untruth 
must always have bad results upon a nature constructed 
in every fibre of its being for truth. And he who feeds 
himself in the highest department of his being upon 
anything that is not true, or fails to feed upon what is 
true, must expect to find that the results are evil and 
harmful to his whole being. The revelation given by 
Jesus Christ to His Church, when He bid her teach 
men “to observe all things whatsoever I have com- 
manded you,” is enough, and only enough, to ensure 
our welfare on our earthly journey. If, therefore, 
any part of that revelation be withheld or tampered 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT HUNGER 143 

with, the result must be loss of perfect health and 
vigour to those who are fed upon insufficient or un- 
healthy food. 

Again, what more spiritual than that bread from 
Heaven provided by our Lord for His people, His own 
sacred Flesh and Blood. Yet many feeding upon it 
unwisely or unworthily, too seldom or too frequently, 
or while in a state of sin, have gained from it not health 
but sickness. St. Paul warns his Corinthian converts 
that because of their unworthy communions “many 
are infirm and weak amongst you, and many sleep ”. 
And on the other hand, what multitudes that no man 
can number have gained through it vigour of mind 
and even of body. 

Thus the food of the spiritual or mental or physical 
nature affects in greater or less degree the whole man. 
For however complex his being, however great the 
inner conflict of one part against the other, man is 
essentially one. 

Now, the great struggle for each of us begins when 
one part of our nature cries out for food that will 
injure the rest. When body or mind hungers and 
thirsts for that which the spirit forbids. We are free 


144 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


to feed ourselves as we will, but we must abide by 
the results. 

Who does not know, which of us has not experi- 
enced, the terrible struggle. Hunger and thirst are 
the strongest expressions of want. The starving man 
or the man parched with thirst in his frenzy will do 
anything to satisfy himself. Under such circumstances 
men will do deeds which are contrary to every instinct 
of humanity from which in saner moments they would 
recoil with horror and disgust. And in whatever part of 
their being this hunger and thirst is raging it is hunger 
and thirst, and corresponds with the craving of the body 
for food and drink. It is the extreme expression of 
want. It seems as if without this food or drink they 
must die. They crave for it as for life. And yet 
to partake of the forbidden food is to poison and kill 
what is highest in them. Some bodily passion alive, 
astir like a hungiy beast in the night, cries out for 
food, and the calm voice of conscience forbids it. The 
heart, the mind, is faint and athirst with wild desire 
for that which it cannot have save at the terrible cost 
of spiritual death. Many a man outwardly calm, pass- 
ing through the great thoroughfares of life, taking part 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT HUNGER 


145 


in its business or pleasures, is torn and tossed and 
maddened by this fierce conflict within his nature. 
Will he yield and throw the food for which it craves to 
this wild beast within him, or will he starve it into sub- 
mission and feed his higher nature till it gains the 
mastery ? That is the question. That is the question 
which each must answer for himself to God and his 
conscience. Upon the answer depends the results 
whether he will sink or rise. 

It was the first temptation of our Lord in the wilder- 
ness ere He entered upon His public ministry; the 
question put by the Tempter to test Him whether He 
had anything to fear from Him or not — “ If Thou be 
the Son of God turn these stones into bread and feed 
Thy starving body”. And our Lord’s answer came 
calm and clear and strong : “Not by bread alone doth 
man live, but by every word that proceedeth out of 
the mouth of God ” He takes no heed of the Tempter’s 
challenge, “If Thou be the Son of God He links 
Himself on to the human race into which He had con- 
descended to enter. Man shall not live by bread 
alone. No man can. There are higher needs than 

those of the flesh, and there are times when it were 

ro 


146 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


better to let the body starve to death than feed it by 
disobeying any word that proceedeth out of the mouth 
of God. 

For there is a hunger of the soul. “ My soul 
thirsteth for Thee, my flesh also longeth after Thee,” 
cried the Psalmist. “Like as the hart panteth after 
the water brooks, so longeth my soul after Thee, O 
God.” Any food given to any lower part of our nature 
that for the moment deadens this hunger, or makes the 
soul incapable of satisfying it, subverts the whole order 
of our nature and works its ruin. It is the truest 
mercy to be stern with ourselves, to sacrifice what is 
lowest in us for what is highest. For as the lower 
nature is constantly refused the food it demands, in 
obedience to the higher, its demands become less in- 
sistent, its hunger less ravenous. It yields at last in 
submission, and the rebellious slave becomes an obedient 
servant. But if the demands of the higher nature be 
refused and it be sacrificed to the lower, though the 
hunger and thirst for God becomes more and more 
deadened and seems at last to die, it never really does 
die. It is the essential need of our being, and it will 
waken at last to wreak its vengeance. A terrible ven- 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT HUNGER 


147 


geance. When — it may be in old age — men find their 
great mistake, and as earthly things pass from their 
grasp the hungry soul knows too late that it can never 
be satisfied, and the cry for God is not the cry of 
devotion but of despair : “ My soul is athirst for God, 
but can nowhere find Him”. 

Therefore our Lord lays down the true law of man’s 
life on earth : “ Blessed are they that hunger and 
thirst after justice, for they shall have their fill.” 




VI. 

BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL, FOR 
THEY SHALL OBTAIN MERCY. 









VI. 

BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL, FOR THEY 
SHALL OBTAIN MERCY. 

The last Beatitude placed the soul under that law of 
self-discipline and self-denial by which it preserved 
and developed amidst its manifold desires the hunger 
and thirst after God. It is left gazing up into 
Heaven. 

This Beatitude brings it down again to earth. For 
gazing into Heaven will not necessarily help to get us 
there. And hungering and thirsting after God neces- 
sitates working for Him. 

For heaven and earth are bound together by 
the closest bonds, and if any one in his desire for 
Heaven would forget or neglect the work of earth, he 
will find that Heaven soon grows dim, or assumes a 
fantastic and unreal form. It is here amidst the con- 
ditions of our earthly life in which we find ourselves 
151 


152 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


placed that our hunger for God is to be developed, 
and our conception of Heaven purified, spiritualised 
and made real. 

For God is to be known and reached, not merely by 
prayer and immediate communion with Him, but by 
fulfilling the duties and obligations of life. We do not 
stand alone. Our life is interwoven with many people 
and many things ; it is not the life of a pure spirit. We 
have bodies as well as souls. We have to act as well 
as to think and love, and though our thoughts may 
reach to Heaven they soon become vague, dreamy 
and deceptive unless they find an outlet through 
action. 

And thus we are tied and bound to the people and 
things of earth by manifold claims and duties which 
we cannot neglect, except at the peril of losing our 
appetite for heavenly things. 

There has been always a tendency with a certain 
type of mind to consider man as a purely spiritual 
being, and to ignore, or try to ignore, the body as 
an integral part of himself and the material things 
amidst which he is placed. Such a false conception 
of his nature and its conditions must always bring its 


BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL 


153 


own revenge. Thought must find expression in action. 
Speculation must be brought to the test of facts. And 
the highest spiritual aspirations of the soul will quickly 
evaporate in unreality and self-deception unless they 
crystallise in definite virtues and good deeds. “ The 
first of all the commandments,” said our Lord, “ is, Thou 
shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, thy 
whole soul, and thy whole mind; and the second is 
like to this, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour 
as thyself.” The love of God, therefore, does not 
rest in itself, it sends us forth to do kindly acts to man. 
If it finds no such expression, it is unreal and un- 
true. 

“If ye love not your neighbour whom ye have seen, 
how can ye love God whom ye have not seen.” The 
love of Heaven, according to the apostle, the reality of 
our relationship to the unseen, is proved and tested by 
the reality of our relationship to the seen and tangible. 
The forces of Heaven are to be applied to and de- 
veloped in the things of earth. It is indeed true that 
we cannot be judged merely by the things that we 
do. There is more in the heart of the poorest and 
humblest than he can express, but all that is in him 


154 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


tries to express itself and goes to make up the value 
of the act, just as the expression of the face is the 
outcome of countless aims, emotion and desires that 
lie behind. 

Just as some scene of Nature has more in it than the 
combination of those things that make it up. 

Thoughts that could not be packed into a single act, 

Fancies that broke through language and escaped, 

All that I could not be, all men ignored in me — 

This I was worth to God whose wheel the pitcher shaped. 

And thus we are bound on all sides to the men and 
things around us by the manifold claims of duty. And 
duty is that which we owe. It is the law of our re- 
lationships to all that we are in contact with. We do 
not make these for ourselves, no more than we make 
the physical laws by which we are surrounded. We 
find them here. I have a duty to everything I own, 
to every person I meet. I may fulfil it or not, as I 
please, but I cannot escape the penalty if I do not 
fulfil it. The broken law avenges itself upon the 
person who breaks it. 

For all these duties, expressed as they may be in the 
terms of law, imply a law-giver. They are in fact the 


BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL 


155 


Will of God. “ The Law,” says St. Paul, “ is holy.” 
And duty is a holy thing, bringing us into a true re- 
lationship with God. If the heart will carry us off in 
its fiery chariot to Heaven, duty brings us back to 
earth to test, to discipline and to educate us. In doing 
our duty and fulfilling the obligations of life, we are 
serving and learning to know God no less truly than 
in prayer. Through the many calls and claims of life 
our character gets rounded off in shapely form and 
due proportion, and our knowledge of God enlarged, 
widened and deepened. Peter on the house-top at 
Joppa had a mysterious vision ; he was carried out of 
himself and lost for the moment in ecstasy. Then 
came the call of duty, the knock at the door, the intru- 
sion of earth upon Heaven. Had he neglected the 
call of duty, which was in fact the appeal of some un- 
known fellow-creature, he would never have understood 
the purport of his mystic Communion with God. It 
was in carrying out the practical work of life that he 
learnt its meaning. 

There are, no doubt, special vocations to a life 
devoted almost entirely to prayer, and those whom 
God calls to such a life He leads and disciplines in His 


156 LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

own way, but except in such extraordinary cases, the 
manifold ties of life, the calls and claims of the people 
and things around us, are meant to be, not hindrances 
to communion with God, nor means of lessening our 
appetite for Divine things, but various ways through 
which the soul is to be trained in the knowledge of 
God. We have only to see the effect upon the 
character of a person who neglects his definite duties 
for prayer to know how great his loss is, and how his 
religion, when it is made an end in itself, instead of a 
means by which everything in life is sanctified and 
elevated, becomes distorted, unreal and a source of self- 
deception. 

In the first Beatitude we are taught our relationship 
to all created things, and the ceaseless conflict that is 
involved in using them aright, lest the things which 
should have been for our use become to us an occasion 
of falling. The duty that is thus imposed upon each 
of us is one of the greatest sources of self-discipline, 
and to the man who is conscious of his own weakness 
and the need of Divine assistance it becomes a means 
of forcing him to prayer and communion with God. 
He quickly learns that in this matter apart from 


BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL 


157 


God he can do nothing, and that he can only do his 
duty through the help of Christ who strengtheneth 
him. 

But this Beatitude brings us into another world. 
A world more difficult to deal with, to know, and to 
understand. The world of men. We live amongst 
people, and we know what a power for good or 
bad they exercise upon us. A man may have learnt 
to be master in the world of things, and yet be 
very far from master in the world of people. We can 
perhaps steel ourselves to be indifferent to things. 
We can learn to do without many things that once 
were necessary to us ; we can train ourselves to sit so 
loose to the things around us that they stir no desire 
in our hearts. But we cannot be indifferent to people. 
All that affects our relationships with men affects 
ourselves. We cannot drive a person out of our life 
as we can give up the use of something. The things 
around us are given us as our servants ; we can shape 
and bend them as we will, we can use them for a time 
and cast them aside, we can exhaust them of all their 
value and then throw them away without a thought ; 
but we cannot so use people. We cannot manipulate 


i5» 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


them as we like, we cannot brush them aside or ignore 
them. A man who has learnt to bend the forces of 
Nature to his will finds that he cannot bend or break 
a person. A strong man is often baffled by a little 
child, because he tries to treat it as he treats every- 
thing else around him as if it were his to mould and 
form as he pleases. Personality has a terrible power of 
inflicting vengeance upon any who would unduly inter- 
fere with its rights. It has rights, and those rights are 
sacred, and he who refuses to recognise them, though 
it be a father with his own child, will surely bear the 
almost ineffaceable marks of the wrong he has done 
branded upon his own character. 

When we turn therefore from things to persons we 
find ourselves in a different world, and amongst forces 
and agents that have to be dealt with in a very different 
way. Here there is a subtle and illusive power that 
reacts in a startling way upon those who have to deal 
with it. A strange magnetism is exhaled from per- 
sonality that repels and attracts and forms unexpected 
combinations. There is a sensitiveness of nature in 
relation to persons that has no parallel with anything 
else. You cannot live with another and be merely 


BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL 


159 


indifferent; the magnetism of personality draws or 
repels. You cannot ignore it, you feel it all over, not 
on this side or on that only, but you feel it all through 
your own personality. Try to ignore any person who 
is living in your house, and you will find it is impossible. 
His mere presence makes claims upon you which, if you 
refuse to recognise, hurt you, follow you about, crowd 
upon your mind, make you angry and embitter you. 
Personality is too aggressively positive to be merely 
set aside ; it has a subtle way of asserting itself that 
you feel all over, causing a pleasure or pain the like of 
which is produced by nothing else. A broken bond 
of kinship or friendship will poison all the springs of 
life. A wound received from another person has a 
poignancy and persistence that hurts to the very 
heart’s core. The love of a person is unlike the love 
of anything or everything else in the world ; it enlarges, 
expands and transforms the whole nature. Surround 
yourself with everything that is ordinarily supposed to 
bring happiness — health, wealth, culture, refinement ; 
the presence of one uncongenial companion with which 
your life is bound up can ruin it all. Or lose everything 
that you have in the world — the presence of one whom 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


160 


you love can enable you to bear it with equanimity. 
No one, thank God, ever lived on earth wholly indiffer- 
ent to and independent of others. If any one ever 
tried to do so he would find that the price of such 
independence was, that it made him inhuman. For 
better or for worse the life of each member of the 
human race is largely dependent upon his relations 
with others. 

We need, therefore, to cultivate that attitude towards 
others that will enable us to draw out the best that is in 
them, and to lead them to draw out the best that is in 
us. 

For we know full well that there are men who in- 
fluence — often quite unconsciously — those with whom 
they are thrown for evil, and others whose influence is 
always for good. It has been a surprise to many a man 
to find how he rouses the worst passions — anger, jeal- 
ousy, dislike — in those with whom he is thrown ; men 
who display no such feelings towards others. There is 
something in him that irritates or repels or excites 
antagonism. It is difficult to say what it is, but there 
it is, and he goes through life a constant source of dis- 
quieting and disturbing influence, though he himself 


BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL 


161 


may be in his way a good man and one who strives 
to do his duty. 

Now the Beatitude lays down the Law that is to 
control our relations with men for good, not for evil, 
and the effort to place ourselves under this Law will 
often disclose to us the cause of our failure, if we have 
failed in the past. 

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain 
mercy” 

It comes upon us perhaps as rather a surprise. 
There are other virtues that would at first sight seem 
more suitable. For this Beatitude, be it remerm 
bered, is the one that regulates our relations with 
the whole world of men for good, that we may deal 
well with them and they with us. That so far as 
in us lies we may make the men we meet better, 
not worse, and may meet at their hands with good, 
not evil. 

We might expect to find a law that would directly 
control our passions, such as patience, self-control, large- 
hearted toleration, unselfishness. 

But I think it will be found that the Beatitude 
II 


i 62 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


includes and goes deeper than any or all of these 
together. 

For what is needed is not merely a disposition that 
protects oneself from the dangers that arise through our 
intercourse with men, but one which goes much fur- 
ther, a disposition which checks the evil and draws out 
the best in others. The Beatitudes are not merely for 
the recluse, they are for men whose duty calls them out 
into the world to mix with men of all kinds, of differ- 
ent faiths and of no faith at all. And towards all whom 
we meet we have a duty ; we are, as Catholics, not only 
the light of the world, but the salt of the earth, the 
leaven that is to leaven the whole mass. How often 
we come back after a morning’s prayer and resolution, 
followed by a day in which we are harried, irritated, set 
on edge by people, and feel as if it would be better to 
leave them all and try to serve God as best we can 
alone. But we know it is impossible. The ties that 
bind us to others are too deep and strong ; the effort to 
break any one of them only reacts upon ourselves and 
loosens our relations with God. We have therefore not 
only to protect ourselves from the evil influences that 
are around us, we have to spread a good influence, to 


BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL 


163 


overcome the evil by good. A person may keep 
his temper with an angry man, and may rather ir- 
ritate him than otherwise ; one may be unselfish in 
one’s dealings with a very selfish person, and may only 
make him more selfish. We need to go further than 
that ; we need to develop that kind of goodness which, 
even if it be only for the moment, tends to draw out 
the good that is in others, and to make them feel that 
goodness is at once stronger and more attractive than 
badness. 

And the Beatitude of mercy sends us into the world 
with that characteristic which above all others disarms 
it and is in the greatest contrast to its spirit. Worldli- 
ness is essentially and aggressively selfish ; it makes men 
hard and cruel, it gives no quarter and expects to get 
none. Its instinct is the struggle for life and the 
survival of the fittest ; it transfers the law of the phy- 
sical world to the world of human beings; it knows 
nothing of, or, if it does, it is afraid to trust, those finer 
qualities of human nature that as a matter of fact equip 
men better for the struggle of life and in the long run 
make them fitter to live. But when it comes in con- 
tact with these it is baffled and disarmed. It has no 
11 * 


164 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


weapons to fight them. It is like a vulgar rich man in 
presence of a gentleman — it feels at a disadvantage. 
Human nature clad in all that is coarsest, most violent, 
most selfish, and thus equipped for the battle of life, in 
the presence of that same nature clad in the panoply of 
Christian virtues, is bewildered and subdued. It not 
only recognises a finer courage, a subtler strength, a 
nobler type, but it perceives its own weakness and 
failure. Like Goliath before David, it may brag and 
boast and bully, but it soon finds a strength with which 
its clumsy weapons are unable to cope, and it confesses 
itself defeated. 

The old Roman Empire with all its consolidated 
strength brought the arms with which it had conquered 
the world to bear upon Christianity, but she found 
herself powerless to fight it ; violence, brute strength, 
cruelty, were met by new weapons — gentleness, pity, 
charity — which not only conquered but converted her, 
and in three hundred years the battle was won and 
the empire became Christian. 

Now this Beatitude is intended to effect these results. 
It not only places the Christian in his dealings with 
others under the law of mercy, that is gentleness, kind- 


BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL 


165 


liness, sympathy, pitifulness, but it assures him that he 
will produce these same characteristics in others. The 
merciful shall obtain mercy. The kindly and gentle 
nature will meet with kindly treatment. Those who 
live under the Law of the Beatitude will, if it be but for 
a moment, disarm the most cruel and selfish and make 
them merciful. 

It is based upon one great principle that runs through 
human nature, and that is the principle of responsive- 
ness. Every man to a large extent makes his own 
world. We find people pretty much as we meet them. 
A reserved man lives in a world that seems closed 
against him. He knows little of what is going on in 
the minds of those around him. He does not receive 
the confidences of others because he does not give his 
confidence to them, and so he goes through a world 
which reflects his own way of treating it. He thinks 
it a cold, uncongenial, solitary place, where men may 
brood over their sorrows and enjoy their lonely joys, 
but where they must not expect much in the way of 
intimate companionship. And yet others find it a very 
different place — radiant with human kindness, warmed 
with loving sympathy, and enriched with manifold 


1 66 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


friendships ; the barriers of reserve go down on all sides 
before them ; people cannot resist their frankness and 
genial good-nature. Each of these men makes his 
own world. It is not that the lot of one is cast amongst 
uncongenial, and the lot of the other amongst congenial 
people, but that each finds people to a very large ex- 
tent as he meets them. Coldness chills those whom 
warmth draws out and expands. It is not the fault of 
the earth that under the leaden skies and blighting 
frosts of winter it brings forth neither fruit nor flowers. 
The movements and growth of life are checked from 
without, under the first breath of spring it wakens 
and responds. So it is with the world of men, they 
are responsive with a superlative sensitiveness to that 
which they meet in others. A hard, domineering 
bully who frightens people into submission has a 
contempt for those whom he has forced to hide 
from him all the finer side of their nature. He has 
nothing in him to draw it out, and he ends in not 
believing in its existence. Yet it is all there to be 
shown to any one who will take the trouble to draw 
it out. 


BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL 


167 


God be thanked, the meanest of His creatures has two soul sides, 
One to face the world with, one to show a woman when he loves her. 

Every one knows how different he is with some 
people from what he is with others; how some, quite 
unconsciously, shut him up within himself, how with 
others he is at his very best. There are dormant in 
every human being possibilities of various kinds, good 
and bad, which are blighted or developed by the people 
amongst whom they are thrown. I do not of course 
mean that this in any sense affects our responsibility 
in matters of right and wrong, but it is certainly true 
as regards the development of character and the unfold- 
ing of our gifts. Many a man would have been very 
different if the influences that surrounded his childhood 
and youth had been different. There are men with 
talents undeveloped, with powers that would have 
done good to their day and generation, unknown 
and unused through the self-distrust begotten by dis- 
couragement. Under more genial influences the world 
would have been the richer for their lives. I believe 
there are few whose whole view of life has not been 
affected by the stern or kindly influences of their 
early childhood, which threw them in upon themselves 


i68 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


in timidity and reserve, or drew them out in genial 
confidence and sympathy with their fellow-creatures. 

It is an interesting and instructive thing to listen to 
the criticism of two or three men upon the same 
people; one can scarcely believe that it is the same 
people who are being criticised. They are the same 
people, but each man not only sees them in a different 
light, but for the moment draws out different sides of 
their character. 

What a different world it looks to us all. We argue 
and try to lead others to see people as we do, but be- 
fore they can do that they must be what we are. We 
make our own world, full of the kindness or unkindness, 
of the good or bad, of the love or hate which we bring 
to bear upon it. 

Now it is upon this sensitive responsiveness of human 
nature that the Beatitude is based. “ Blessed are the 
merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.” “Go out,” it 
says, “into the world, with your heart full of gentleness 
and pity, and you will find the response of kindliness 
from others ; you will not only protect yourself from 
being hardened, but you will draw out the gentler side 
of others.” 


BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL 


169 


But while it is quite true that each man makes his 
own world, draws out for the moment one side or other 
of the people with whom he is thrown and sees the 
best or worst of them as the case may be, yet this of 
course is not the whole truth. There is existing in the 
world a vast and terrible amount of evil. The gentlest 
and kindliest of men, though they may personally ex- 
perience little that is not good in those who are brought 
under the magic spell of their own loving hearts, know 
full well the evil that is in the world — none have known 
it better than the Saints. And evil can undoubtedly 
take very attractive forms, and can even make those 
who yield to its influence attractive. But it can also be 
very repulsive and loathsome and very hard to bear. 
And we have to deal with evil not in the abstract but in 
the concrete. We have to come in daily contact, into 
close intercourse with those upon whom evil has laid 
its disfiguring hand. 

But it may be said, whatever the defects of our own 
day, it is certainly not wanting in the spirit of mercy. 
Indeed it might be considered one of its most marked 
characteristics. It is the age of tender-heartedness and 
pity. There are societies of all sorts formed for carry- 


170 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


ing out works of mercy and kindness to man and beast, 
societies for prevention of cruelty to children and to ani- 
mals, antivivisection societies, etc. The age of cruelty 
is passed away, and under the more civilising influences 
of our time the age of mercy has taken its place. 
The human heart has become so sensitive that it 
cannot bear even the punishment of the guilty, and 
however great the criminal and however outrageous 
his crime, the sufferings that he has cost to others is 
forgotten in the wave of unhealthy sentiment that is 
awakened at the thought of his bearing the penalty 
of his sins. There is certainly no lack of pity amongst 
us to-day. 

Yet it is well to bear in mind that a characteristic 
which seems to be a virtue is not really a virtue, unless it 
forms an essential part of the character as a whole, 
acting not merely under certain circumstances and with 
certain people, but always and with every one. A man 
is not charitable who loves his own friends but is indif- 
ferent to others, nay, he is not charitable if he is want- 
ing in love to one individual ; charity to be a virtue 
must be universal, it must be a characteristic of the 
person. So one would not call a man patient who was 


BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL 171 

ever so patient in public life but irritable at home. Or 
broad-minded and tolerant who sympathised with every 
form of misbelief or unbelief, but was fiercely intolerant 
of dogmatic faith. Such partial and limited character- 
istics are to be found in every one ; they are not neces- 
sarily the outcome either of effort or grace, they are 
merely the expression of natural inclination. A virtue 
to be such in the Christian sense of the word, must be 
universal in its operation and have its roots in the 
person. 

And so it is with mercy. One may be very merciful 
in one’s judgments upon those who fail in some ways, 
and very unmerciful on those who fail in others. Many 
people are quite pitiless towards those whose tempta- 
tions are not their own. Again one may be full of pity 
and toleration of the faults of those one loves, and abso- 
lutely intolerant of those one does not love. A man 
may be the most gentle man in the world towards those 
who are near and dear to him, and positively cruel to 
others. One who is pitiless or cruel to one person has 
not the virtue of mercy. 

And it is not at all uncommon to find such partial 
exercise of mercy. There are those who display a 


172 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


morbid and sickly compassion towards the sufferings of 
animals who are entirely unmoved by the sufferings of 
their fellow-creatures. Many a woman shows infinitely 
more tenderness and care and compassion for her dog 
than she does for her overworked and uncared-for ser- 
vants. It is well to tell such people plainly that their 
morbid sensitiveness and unhealthy affections have no- 
thing whatever to do with the Christian virtue of mercy. 
Such people are, in fact, often not merciful at all, but 
cruel. 

Cruelty, unkind ness, indifference to the sufferings of 
one of God’s creatures, be it man or beast, destroys the 
virtue of mercy, or rather discloses the fact that it does 
not exist. Where the mercy of the Beatitude exists, 
it exists as an essential element of character, to be 
called forth by every or any form of sorrow or suffer- 
ing or trouble with which it is brought in contact. 
It acts not upon certain kinds of suffering, or certain 
people, or under certain circumstances ; it does not cut 
up the creatures of God into departments, pitying and 
feeling for some, but pitiless towards others. It is 
universal. It has only to see what is pitiful to feel 
pity. The person endowed with this virtue is one who 


BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL 


173 


always and everywhere displays it. It is a personal 
characteristic, making the whole man throughout his 
whole being sensitive, gentle, easily moved to compas- 
sion, whether to friend or foe, to man or beast. The 
whole character is softened by it. The man is pitiful 
and compassionate, no element of hardness or unkind- 
ness is to be found in him. This is a very different 
thing from the spurious forms of mercy that are so 
common around us, and that so often bring this great 
virtue into contempt, displaying itself in sentimental 
emotion and not seldom in moral weakness. Such 
unworthy imitations bring a blessing neither upon those 
who display them nor upon those upon whom they are 
exercised. 

And yet the very existence of these spurious forms 
of the mercy of the Beatitude bear witness to the fact 
that the virtue itself is not as simple a one as we might 
imagine. It very easily degenerates into weakness and 
softness, an excusing of what is definitely wrong, often 
a condoning of sin in compassion for the sinner. A 
mercy that from pity to man will tamper with the 
character and moral attributes of God is a mercy that 
in the long run must bring a curse rather than a bless- 


174 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


ing. The Catholic is put into the world to be the salt 
of the earth, the light of the world, the leaven that 
is to quicken the whole mass with the principles of 
Divine truth and holiness. 

It were better for the world, if such a thing were 
possible, that no pity should ever be shown to man than 
that the principles of morality and Christian virtue 
should be tampered with, out of a false conception of 
mercy. When God revealed Himself to Moses on the 
Mount He revealed Himself as “ the Lord God, merci- 
ful and gracious, patient and of much compassion, 
who will by no means clear the guilty”. On the 
cross mercy and truth met together. If it was the 
most perfect display of the infinite compassion of God 
towards the sinner, it was also an awful revelation of 
the grievousness of sin. 

It would be but false mercy on God’s part to 
allow men to believe that His law could lightly be 
tampered with. God is all-holy, and His love and 
compassion towards sinful man cannot lead Him 
to condone sin or to lower the moral standard to suit 
man’s weakness. No sin can be forgiven till the sinner 
is penitent, that is, takes an attitude of antagonism 


BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL 


175 


towards sin, comes over in heart, however weak his 
will, to the side of the all-holy God. The infinite pity 
of God, the love displayed upon the Cross, great though 
it be, cannot pardon the impenitent, cannot bend the 
moral law and lower the standard of the world to save 
one person who still remains on the side of sin. The 
God who is full of compassion and mercy, is the God 
who is the hater of iniquity. However great His mercy 
it cannot mar the lustre of His holiness. It would be 
a moral disaster to the world if it did. Had God re- 
vealed to man only His infinite mercy and not His 
holiness, men would have gone on sinning with impun- 
ity in the belief that God was too merciful to punish sin, 
that His love was colourless and unmoral. He would 
have been treated as a father is treated by his wayward 
son, who knows that his love for him is too weak to 
resist his entreaties, and whose love only makes him 
more wanton and exacting. 

The Cross stands out in the centre of Christendom 
as the Revelation of God’s love and holiness, yet in the 
face of that ever-present Revelation it is hard enough 
for man to realise the evil of sin and the holiness of 
God. What would the moral condition of the world 


176 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


have been without it? It is not as easy a thing as it 
seems for God to teach man the moral character of His 
mercy. That it would not be for his good but for his 
ruin if mercy were separated from justice. Even in the 
conduct of the State a mercy that would overshadow 
justice would be its ruin — “ Stet justitia ruat ccelum ”. 

The mercy therefore of which the Beatitude speaks, 
and upon which it utters a blessing, is the human 
counterpart of the mercy of God. It is a mercy pene- 
trated with morality. A mercy aflame with the love 
of holiness, born of the love of the Holy One. How- 
ever tender, pitiful, compassionate towards the sinner, 
it is instinct with justice and the sense of the hateful- 
ness of sin. It is strong on the side of God and right. 
It can stoop very low, to the most degraded, the most 
sin bespattered, to those whom sin has trodden in the 
veiy mire, but it stoops with pity to raise them. It 
sympathises with the sinner, it never shows a particle 
of sympathy with sin. It keeps the lustre of its gar- 
ments unstained while it walks through the haunts of vice 
and lives in an atmosphere hot and weighted with the 
fever of sin. It shines in the darkness and gives light 
to them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death 


BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL 


i 77 


to guide their feet into the way of peace. It is there- 
fore composed of two elements blended in perfect pro- 
portion — justice and compassion; justice alone may 
degenerate into hardness, compassion alone into soft- 
ness and weakness. Blended together, justice gives 
tone and strength to compassion, and compassion takes 
the edge off justice. Mercy is therefore perfectly just 
and true and firm and strong. There is in it the 
perfect blending of tenderness and strength. It does 
not close its eyes to the reality and greatness of the 
evil, while it is full of tenderness to the evil-doer. 
None can speak more strongly of the grievousness of 
sin and of its terrible penalties than the merciful man. 
None sees with clearer eyes the real condition of 
things about him. Those to whom he shows mercy 
know full well that they cannot deceive him, that he 
is not a weakling with whom they can play tricks. 
He can condemn with fiery words what ought to be 
condemned and expose fraud with scorn. He can 
seem to those who do not know him even hard, though 
in fact there is no hardness in him. 

For this mercy is not the mere natural pity of one 

man for another. It is supernatural. It is born of the 
12 


178 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


soul’s union with God. The springs of its life are 
rooted in God Himself. It is the compassion, there- 
fore, of a person essentially holy. And poor sinful 
man striving after holiness finds this gentleness and 
pity well forth from its holy source. From this source 
alone it can find its origin and preserve its purity and 
its strength. If it breaks away from it, it sinks down 
into all the frailty and weakness of mere human pity 
that can be swayed and moved and blinded by emo- 
tion, sentiment and ignorance. It loses its force and 
fibre, its Divine insight into the truth of things, it is 
no longer kindled with the light of justice, and may 
become a source of moral weakness, an instrument of 
evil rather than of good. We know but too well how 
much is said and done to-day in the name of mercy to 
lower the moral tone of Christians. Men are not sup- 
posed to be able to rise to the standard that has been 
kept before them for 2,000 years either of morals or of 
doctrine, and a weak and spurious mercy stretches 
forth its hands and tampers with the teaching and 
revelation of our Lord. Such mercy, though it be 
applauded for a moment, in the long run neither blesses 
nor is blest. 


BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL 


179 


How then shall those who would go forth into the 
world so full of suffering and sorrow and above all so 
full of sin, keep unsullied and in the fulness of its 
vigour the Christian virtue of mercy. 

1. They must ever be striving to see things in the 
light of God. To remember that even God’s love is 
the fruit of His holiness. That “our God is a con- 
suming fire” however pitiful, compassionate and loving 
He is, and that in all our considerations of life, God 
must ever come first. 

2. At the same time and as the outcome of this they 

must strive to cultivate pity and gentleness for all 

forms of suffering, and especially for those suffering 

under the slavery of sin, loving and pitying the sinner, 

however repulsive the sin. It is easy to sympathise 

with those whose sufferings and sins are the same as 

our own, but we must try to enter into the sufferings 

of those with whom we naturally feel no sympathy, 

even as our Lord did, for “we have not a High 

Priest who cannot have compassion on our infirmities, 

but one tempted in all things like as we are, without 

sin” It is indeed those whose lives are most like 

* 


12 


i8o 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


His in purity and holiness, whose sympathies are 
strongest and widest, being unblunted by sin. 

3. And this can be done by contemplating God’s 
goodness and mercy in our experience of His dealings 
with ourselves. Then, if we have sinned and repented, 
we see how mercy and truth have met together, justice 
and peace have kissed each other. If God can love 
me> so each of us must feel, whom can He not love ? 
If God can pardon me, whom can He not pardon? 
The only sin we know in all its malice is our own, for 
we can see against what light and love it was com- 
mitted. The love of God which we can alone fathom 
in all its length and breadth and depth and height is 
the love which He has shown to us. And we know 
that His love towards us was a love instinct with 
justice, demanding penitence and renewal of life, and 
leaving behind the suffering which sin has brought, to 
cleanse and purify the soul and unite it with Himself. 
We experience in our own persons the reconciliation 
of mercy and truth, the kiss of justice and peace, and 
this experience which outreaches all knowledge attained 
by theological studies or the teaching of the wisest and 
the best, sends us out into the world to show mercy to 


BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL 


181 


all men, and to assist in raising the poor out of the 
dust and the beggar from the dunghill to set them 
amongst the princes, even amongst the princes of the 
people, and to gain for ourselves the fullness of the 
blessing of the Beatitude, “Blessed are the merciful, 
for they shall obtain mercy”. 








VII. 

BLESSED ARE THE CLEAN OF 
HEART, FOR THEY SHALL SEE GOD. 





VII. 

BLESSED ARE THE CLEAN OF HEART, 
FOR THEY SHALL SEE GOD. 

There is no greater mistake nor one fraught with more 
fatal consequences than to defend what one conceives 
to be the honour of God at the cost of the realities of 
life. Yet it is not uncommon for devout persons to 
argue a priori as to what they conceive God should do 
rather than as to what He actually does or permits. 
Job’s comforters sought to console him by pressing 
upon him a theory of God’s government of the world, 
which his experience had proved to him to be contrary 
to facts ; indeed the sufferings which he was enduring 
were permitted in order to clear his mind from the 
baneful influence of the very theory they were pressing. 
A faith that can live only under the shelter of ignorance, 
or by closing our eyes to the visible realities around us, 
will not be of much avail when we are brought face to 

face with the stern and perplexing facts of life. We 
185 


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LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


may be confident that a faith which is to be defended 
at the expense of truth is not itself true and is not 
worth defending. 

The Revelation that God has given us of His own 
character, is the Revelation of the moral attributes of 
Him who is the Creator and Ruler of the world in 
which we live. This world with all its perplexing 
problems we are meant to know and study, the Revela- 
tion if true cannot be in antagonism to what we see 
and know. We shall never be called upon, in the 
interests of Revelation, to close our eyes to what we 
see, or to deny what we know to be true. The in- 
structed Catholic faces and studies life fearlessly, with 
the certainty that, though he may find much that he 
cannot explain or understand, he will find nothing that 
is contrary to what is revealed to faith. 

Now whatever may be our theories of what God 
ought in justice to do for man, it is beyond question 
that there are many whom to all appearance He has 
placed in circumstances that seem almost to ensure 
their failure. Things are against them, and they have 
not the courage or the power, or whatever it is that is 
needed, to rise above or through them. If only circum- 


BLESSED ARE THE CLEAN OF HEART 


187 


stances had been a little less unfavourable, nay, less 
absolutely against them, if they had had one good 
chance, many a man’s life would have been very dif- 
ferent. We see men like swimmers battling bravely 
against the currents, and at last yielding, exhausted, to 
a force that is to all appearance too strong for them. 

Of course we cannot see into another’s heart, we can 
but judge from what we do see, illuminated by what 
we know from our own experience. No doubt we 
ought to have so firm a grasp upon the Hand of Christ 
that however the waves and storms may be against us 
we are safe. But we poor creatures of destiny, knowing 
life as we see it and feel it, know well the awful strength 
of the things that are seen, and how dim and uncertain 
in the storm and stress appear the things that are not 
seen. 

Indeed our Lord Himself tells us how strong is the 
force of circumstance, and how with other opportunities 
men would have been better: “Woe unto thee, Cho- 
razin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty 
works that have been done in you had been done in 
Tyre and Sidon, they had done penance long ago in 
sackcloth and ashes.” 


i88 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


Things then, according to our Lord’s own words, were 
not as favourable for the inhabitants of the cities of 
Tyre and Sidon as they were for those of the cities of 
Galilee in His time. No doubt the men of Tyre will 
not be judged either by the standard or opportunities 
of the men of Chorazin and Bethsaida. And no doubt 
if we could look into the hearts of men, we should find 
how each of those who have gone down under the pres- 
sure of circumstances had his chance, the offers of grace, 
and felt perhaps the first movements of another current 
that would have counteracted the pressure of the forces 
around him. But who can tell? Each has but his 
own experience to go upon from which he can judge 
of all that is for and against his victory over outer 
things. And such knowledge can but fill us with 
charity in our judgments of those who go under and 
are carried along in the mighty stream of circumstance. 

Yet I suppose that there is no one who has failed 
but knows that at least he need not have failed as 
badly as he did, and can see in looking back, calls and 
opportunities to which if he had corresponded the 
results wouid have been very different. 

But when we have said all, we can only feel that the 


BLESSED ARE THE CLEAN OF HEART 189 

whole thing is a mystery ; that if men demand an ex- 
planation it cannot be given at least on this side of the 
grave, and that we can but cling to two things of which 
we Catholics at least are absolutely certain. First, that 
God is just, and demands of no man more than He 
gives him the power to do. That He judges men 
therefore by no hard and fast rule or standard, but 
gives due weight to every consideration of place, circum- 
stances, temperament and training. That the man with 
the one talent was not condemned because he did not 
do the work of the man with five, but because he did 
not do wh?t a man with one talent could and ought to 
have done. “Out of thine own mouth will I judge 
thee.” His own paltry excuses formed the materials 
upon which his judgment was based. And secondly, 
we know that God is love, and willeth not that any 
should perish, but that all should be saved ; and that 
love does not see the worst in those that are loved but 
the best, does not scrutinise everything that is done 
to see if it can find ought to condemn, but rather to 
commend, and that we are to be judged at the last day 
not by an enemy, but, if I may say so, a lover, and that 
He judges rather by what is aimed at than by what is 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


i go 


accomplished. And we may recall with consolation 
the words of St. John : “If our heart condemn us, God 
is greater than our heart and knoweth all things 

But there are times when it seems as if God Him- 
self places us in difficulties — difficulties under which, 
alas ! many fail. When it would be impossible without 
unfaithfulness to the known Will of God, or the claims 
of religion, to avoid entering upon some position full 
of danger and temptation. Saul was called by God 
to be the first King of Israel, and it proved his ruin. 
Judas was called to be an Apostle — “ Have I not,” 
said our Lord, “ chosen you twelve ” — and failed utterly. 
And we know no doubt in our own experience not a 
few who were doing very well in an ordinary course 
of life, but were forced from the very highest motives, 
and in obedience to the evident Will of God, into a more 
important position of responsibility and danger where 
they made shipwreck of their lives. 

I think in such cases it is helpful to remember this — 
that such failures cannot be attributed so readily as it 
seems to the mere fact of the change of position and 
surroundings, but probably to some inherent weakness 
of character, or some fault which the more sheltered 


BLESSED ARE THE CLEAN OF HEART 


191 


life failed to bring to light or to remedy. But it was 
there, and for the development and sanctification of 
the soul it was necessary that it should be dealt with. 
We are not placed on earth to be sheltered from 
temptation, but to be tried and proved and developed. 
“ My son,” says the wise man, “ if thou wilt seek the 
Lord, prepare thine heart for temptation.” The 
Psalmist who had entered into the Mind of God, cries 
“ Try me, O God, and seek the ground of my heart, 
prove me and examine my thoughts, look well if there 
be any way of wickedness in me”. He asks not for 
shelter but testing. 

Now it generally happens that after a certain time 
we get all that can be got out of the place and circum- 
stance in which we find ourselves. We need, like a 
tree that has not room to grow, to be transplanted. 
We might live on the rest of our lives where we are, 
and never do anything very bad or very good. But 
we should never get to know ourselves better, or to do 
the real work of life. There are in us probably faults 
of character which only need circumstances to bring to 
light. The character has capacities for good and evil 
which must be tested. Our present position has done 


IQ2 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


for us all it could, we must pass on. A boy learns all 
that one tutor can teach him and he goes to another ; 
perhaps one of the first lessons he learns from the 
change is how ignorant he is of many things. Most 
lads who have been brought up at home and have never 
had the rough handling and healthy criticism of school, 
lose something which it is difficult to gain in later life. 
They have been sheltered, no doubt, but they have not 
got either the knowledge of themselves or the true 
proportion and perspective of life that they would have 
gained, and ought to have gained, in the time of pre- 
paration. 

Thus, having learnt the lessons that are to be learnt 
in one position we are called to another ; we must 
either go on or stagnate, we can grow no more where 
we are. There are risks, perhaps great risks, in the 
change, but we must face them ; there are more than 
risks, though of a different kind, in staying where we 
are. 

And so it happens that the Providence of God leads 
many a man backwards and forwards, hither and thither, 
from this position into that — from a position of depend- 
ence to one of responsibility ; from a sheltered home to 


BLESSED ARE THE CLEAN OF HEART 


193 


a place alive with risks and danger ; from crowds to 
solitude, or solitude to crowds; from a place where 
every privilege and help of religion can be had to one 
where he is thrown alone upon God without even the 
Sacraments, — and all this that the character may be 
tested, proved and rounded off on all sides, and every 
fault and weakness brought to light, and if so be, 
corrected. 

Such a process is no doubt full of risks and fraught 
with danger, and under its strain many fail, but be it 
always remembered that the man who fails by some 
positive failure before the eyes of the world and under 
great difficulties and temptations may be no worse, 
nay, may be much better, than the man whose whole 
life has been a slinking away from danger and re- 
sponsibility, a sheltering himself behind others, a re- 
fusal to face things — whose failures have been perhaps 
rather negative than positive, if sloth and cowardice 
and selfishness be negative. It is better to know our 
weaknesses and faults than to have them and not 
know them, better, may I say, to fail in the midst of 
noble effort than not to fail because there has been 
nothing either noble or involving effort in the whole life. 
13 


194 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


Now the Beatitude of the clean of heart brings this 
out. 

The former Beatitude developed in the soul that 
characteristic which draws out the best side of men, 
and keeps back all that is most harsh and cruel. The 
merciful obtain mercy, and see the world at its best. 
And yet its business is in the world. This kindly and 
gentle nature is not to cloister itself. On the contrary, 
it is to live amongst men, and men who in its presence 
put forth all that is best in them. And we know what 
an attractive place the world is even when it shows us 
a very ugly side ; what a spell it casts upon us ; how 
hard it is, even when it turns its back on a man or 
woman and treats them with a cruelty of which it alone 
is capable, how hard it is to resist its fascination. 

And into this world the Catholic is sent to make it 
more attractive still! to draw out, if it be but for a 
moment, that spirit of mercy towards others of which 
it is so much in need. He is not— unless because of 
some special vocation — to come out from the world 
and leave it to sink in its own corruption. On the 
contrary, the Catholic is to act as the leaven that is to 
mix with the heavy dough to quicken and energise it 


BLESSED ARE THE CLEAN OF HEART 


195 


with a new life. The wheat is to grow in the midst of 
the tares; the wise and foolish virgins are side by side. 
The Church is to mix with the world, to impregnate it 
with her principles, and to overcome the evil that is 
within it by good. 

And what is the Church in this sense of the word, 
as mixing in the social, political, mercantile world, but 
individual, often isolated Catholics. A priest cannot 
go and preach in a ball-room or on the Stock Ex- 
change. But those Catholics whose position in life 
places them there can preach if not by word at least 
by conduct. It is thus that they act as the salt of the 
earth and the light of the world. 

But such a position is fraught with serious danger, 
lest, instead of converting others they should them- 
selves be converted to the ways of the world, made 
more beautiful, if but for the moment, by their presence. 
Yet this danger is not to be escaped from by shirking 
duty, and the mere cowardly flight from difficulties. 
There are lessons to be learnt, characteristics to be 
developed, tests to which the soul is to be put there 
and there only. Fly from the position in which God 
has placed you and the duty He has given you to do, 


ig6 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


and you fail of the testing and development you can 
get there alone, you escape one danger by exposing 
yourself to another and a greater. 

Therefore this Beatitude follows : “ Blessed are the 
clean of heart, for they shall see God Blessed are 
those who living in the midst of the world keep their 
standards unsullied and undimmed by all the lowering 
influences around them. 

Now there are broadly speaking two classes of 
persons to whom this is specially difficult. 

1. There are those who have the natural gift of sym- 
pathy, whose natures are widely open to all the currents 
and influences of human life, who delight to live in the 
midst of their fellow-creatures, and to feel about them 
the movements of life and the contact of others. They 
are open and easy of access, and easy to get on with ; 
people who at once win your confidence, and even 
before they open their lips make you feel that you 
would find no difficulty in speaking to them. 

2. And there are others who are self-contained and 
reserved, who, if they have deep feelings and are deeply 
moved have the misfortune of not being able to let 
others see it. Whatever may be going on beneath the 


BLESSED ARE THE CLEAN OF HEART 


197 


surface, the surface is calm and cold and sometimes 
repellent. Often indeed such persons inwardly are very 
different, they long to break through the barriers and 
get out. Strong emotion, deep feeling, intense excite- 
ment cannot find utterance, they are expressed in 
awkward words that leave a false impression. What 
they long to say freezes upon their lips and sounds 
hopelessly inadequate in their own ears. The fire that 
is in their hearts dies cold and chilled when they would 
give it expression.- Sometimes some little natural de- 
fect, awkwardness of manner, timidity or shyness, holds 
them back from a life they long to live, and from in- 
tercourse with those whom they long to know. It is all 
there, a very volcano of feeling and intensity. But they 
pass amongst men as chilling, unsympathetic, inhuman. 

Now each of these class of persons living in the 
great world has his own special difficulties in keeping 
his heart pure from the lowering influences amidst 
which his lot is cast. 

It is one thing to classify sins in the cold catalogue 
of words. It is a very different thing to see these sins 
committed by men and women who are nothing if 
they are not charming, attractive and refined. 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


198 


For instance, you know that insincerity is a very 
odious thing, that an insincere person is one who never 
can be trusted and ought never under any circumstances 
to be encouraged. And yet with this knowledge clear 
before your mind you spend a delightful half-hour 
talking to a person who scarcely takes the trouble to 
conceal his insincerity, saying things to please you 
which you know are not true and which neither he nor 
you believes. And thinking it over you have to con- 
vince yourself again that all this charming unreality is 
really as much a sin against truth as a vulgar lie told 
you by a beggar in the street. Uncharitable words 
we know are wrong — we are warned against them in 
the Gospels, their sinfulness is impressed upon us in 
all the spiritual books ; it is very wrong to pick your 
neighbours, character to pieces. But when it is done in 
a very amusing way and with a keen sense of the 
ridiculous, and withal by a person who is refined and 
sympathetic, it is difficult to feel that there is much 
harm in it. The brilliantly clever and daring way 
in which some of my ideals were treated in a light 
conversation, half-banter and half-earnest, by a man 
or woman of the world who showed experience and 


BLESSED ARE THE CLEAN OF HEART 


199 


a knowledge of the world in the turn of every phrase, 
hid the subtle poison that flowed through it all, and 
made me feel for the first time somewhat behind the 
times, and as if my ideals were a little stultified and 
old-fashioned. 

We know well as Catholics the sacredness of the 
marriage law and the strong condemnation by our 
Lord of those who put away the partner of their 
marriage and marry another. But when one very 
near and dear to us, under shelter of the law of the 
land, violates the law of God and lives openly in legal- 
ised adultery, and when we meet such a person and 
find to our astonishment that she does not seem to 
have deteriorated in other ways, and is recognised by 
the world as one living in the lawful state of matri- 
mony, it is difficult to realise that the wrong is just 
the same as though it had not the shelter of the law. 
That the sin is no less odious than if it were flaunted 
beneath the gas lamps of the street with all the squalid 
misery of painted cheeks and shabby finery. 

Sins interpreted in terms of human personality, and 
often a very charming personality, quickly become 
transformed. I think most of us know one or two 


200 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


persons who, for the moment at least, could take the 
ugliness out of almost any sin and give it a certain 
graciousness. Words spoken by human lips sound 
very different from those same words upon the cold 
page of a book. Life, personality, passion, breathe 
through them and seem to burn out the inherent 
coarseness and vulgarity of their bald meaning. Good 
women will marry men whom they know to be 
thoroughly bad ; the badness which in the abstract 
they would fiercely resent, they more than condone 
in the concrete. We often hear it said, “ I like so and 
so in spite of his faults,” and yet it would be well 
within the truth to say, “ I like even his faults, nay, 
I like him because of his faults”. He has a way of 
making his faults attractive. 

It is true, we all know it and feel it. Sin considered 
in itself as a violation of the law of God and of our 
own nature is an ugly thing, but in the concrete, and 
revealed in the charming atmosphere of an attractive 
personality, it is very different. There are diseases, 
often loathsome and deadly, which give an added 
beauty and refinement to their victims. The autumn 
leaf has a splendour of its own, and the setting sun 


BLESSED ARE THE CLEAN OF HEART 


201 


in the fierce glory of its decline attracts many who 
would be unmoved by the chaste beauty of its rising. 
And sin is death — moral and spiritual death. And 
therefore for those who are naturally sympathetic there 
is a danger from constantly living in the society of 
people whose aims and standards are so different from 
their own. They see and hear things done and said 
in the easy and pleasant manner of those about them 
that in the quiet of their own room their conscience 
condemns. Are these things really so bad as they were 
taught to believe? Are they not a little prudish? 
Are they to cultivate the spirit of a prig and condemn 
what is done by men and women who are in many 
ways far better than themselves ? 

We read the Decalogue, and its interpretation and 
application by our Lord, and we see the men and 
women who in their faulty way try to obey it. We 
know nothing of the inner struggle, the brave efforts, 
the penitence for the many failures. We see only the 
result. A character full of inconsistencies ; here and 
there some fair virtue in a very worthless and tar- 
nished setting, a person who seems to be constantly 
hampered by an over-anxious conscience, and one not 


202 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


very comfortable to live with. And then we see others 
who go with the currents that are around them, who 
never protest, never are shocked, but fall in with perfect 
ease with the ways and lives of the easy-going world, 
who have a pleasant smile for the weaknesses of human 
nature, and do not ask or expect much from it as long 
as it keeps itself within the limits of decency. The 
natural human sympathy, which is a thing most good 
in itself, one of the great attributes of our Lord, tends 
to soften our judgments not merely of the people who 
do these things, which is quite right, but of the wrong 
things that are done. 

How can an abstract cold standard have a chance 
against living types of character. How can Moses with 
his Law written on two tables of stone, even though 
they be written by the Finger of God, stand against 
Aaron and the daughters of Israel dancing round the 
golden calf. No wonder that he threw them from him 
in despair and broke them to atoms. The cold chaste 
standards of a rigid orthodoxy, whether in doctrine or 
manners, has a poor chance in presence of the warm 
palpitating life of human beings who to all appearance 


BLESSED ARE THE CLEAN OF HEART 


203 


get on so well without them. Surely God should have 
known His world better. 

And then there are the other class. Those who are 
not or who cannot show that they are sympathetic, 
living in the midst of the world, yet shut out from its 
intimacy by the barriers of their unconquerable reserve. 
It is impossible to live in constant intercourse with peo- 
ple and not be influenced by them in some way. The 
mere presence of another person in the room cannot be 
ignored, or treated as one would treat a piece of furni- 
ture. Somehow it affects us, we feel it all over. A 
silent person in the room gets on one’s nerves. We 
want to break the silence to find some point of contact. 
We feel as if two persons thrown together for any 
length of time ought to be in some sort of communica- 
tion with one another, the solidarity of the human race 
demands it. And if there be no intercourse there are 
mysterious actions of one upon the other that operate 
like mesmeric currents and attract or repel or set up a 
kind of psychic irritation. 

And this, and far more than this, is felt in a crowd 
of people. A crowd fills the air with sympathy and 
creates a mysterious atmosphere of its own. We be- 


204 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


come moved and excited in a crowd as we are nowhere 
else. Reserve seems thrown aside, the air is charged 
with electricity. 

Now those who are daily living under such circum- 
stances, in the midst of people whom they are con- 
stantly thrown with, and yet shut out from, because of 
their shyness or reserve must suffer keenly from their 
exclusion. 

It will either make them bitter, cynical, more aloof ; 
they will find themselves constantly passing judgment 
upon those who say and do things that they would give 
the world to be able to say and do ; or it will make them 

> 

in their desperation, daring and reckless. They cannot 
merely stand apart and find pleasure in the enjoyment 
of others. They get to hate them for having what 
they have not, or they are prepared to do anything to 
be as they are. 

I think there is no one capable of such daring, per- 
haps even of such badness, as the woman who wants 
to throw herself into the tumultuous life around her 
and is held back by the fact that she has not the natural 
gifts that would bring her to the front. The restraints 
that she chafes against, the things that she sees and 


BLESSED ARE THE CLEAN OF HEART 


205 


hears, and interprets perhaps as even worse than they 
are, all prepare her for a reckless plunge when she 
gets the chance. If she has been religiously brought 
up she revolts against the standards which she tries to 
imagine hold her back. The beauty and easy ways of 
human life from which she is shut out, rouses in her a 
fierce antagonism against what she considers the narrow 
lines of her training, and her rebellious and bitter spirit 
throws them to the winds and tears them to tatters at 
the first chance she gets. 

Verily if the Church is the training place for holiness 
and the Vision of God, the world with its cheery disre- 
gard for all that is serious, and its easy standards and 
its broad toleration and its appearance of refinement 
even in what is immoral, is the enemy of God. 

Yet it cannot be left to itself and its corruptions. 
The claims of duty call multitudes of Catholics into it. 
Indeed the one breakwater against the ever-rising tide 
of sin and complete disregard of God and His com- 
mandments is the presence of the Church in her midst. 

Therefore the great danger to those who know the 
truth and the right and are constantly in contact with 
those whose ways and standards are different, is that 


206 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


of losing tone, of feeling that after all we must take 
things as we find them, and that Catholics are apt to 
be too rigid and a little narrow in their judgments of 
men and things, and that it is a good thing for them 
to rub shoulders with men and women who think and 
act differently. But they do not see that this often 
means that the salt loses its flavour and is trodden 
under the feet of men. 

How then is it possible for them to live in the midst 
of all this lowering atmosphere and to keep themselves 
unspotted from the world ? 

One thing I think is clear. No mere abstract 
standard of right and truth can hold out for long 
against the overwhelming influence of human life when 
it is not gross, but on the contrary when, even in its 
vices, it is cultivated and refined, and repudiates as much 
as any Catholic, though from different motives, all that 
is vulgar and degrading in sin. What chance can law 
have in comparison with life ? Or the cold voice that 
forbids and commands, against the warm radiating in- 
fluences that flow forth from living beings, throbbing 
with vitality. Who does not know the dissolving effect 
of a well-loved voice and presence upon a resolution 


BLESSED ARE THE CLEAN OF HEART 


207 


formed in the solitude of one’s own chamber? Who 
has not experienced how quickly the piercing voice of 
conscience can be argued into silence if it be only for 
one fatal moment? “It is not good for man to be 
alone ” ; the law of his nature compels him to form 
companionships and friendships, and these are, for good 
or evil, the strongest influences upon his life. 

How then can men find an influence strong enough 
to counteract the lowering effect of the moral tone 
which surrounds them? 

There is but one way. Personal influence must be 
met by personal influence. Nothing else is strong 
enough or real enough. A law will not do, it must be 
a person. Many a character has been strengthened 
and transformed by a noble friendship which gave a 
concrete and living expression to the hazy ideals that 
were not strong enough to counteract the surrounding 
influences. 

We need to see the beauty of goodness in order to 
realise the ugliness of sin, in however seductive a form 
it may clothe itself. We need the vision of human 
life, as God designed it, that we may be dissatisfied 
with what man has made it. But not a vision drawn 


208 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


by some artist’s hand or described by some great 
writer, but one that is alive and close to us, with whom 
we can hold communion and live in closest friendship, 
one who is wholly free from all those weaknesses and 
idiosyncrasies which mar and disfigure the beauty of 
holiness. It is only a Living Being that can counteract 
the mighty currents of the life that surges around us at 
full tide. It is only a human heart that can break the 
spell of human influence that drags us down. The fair 
and noble Form of the central Figure of the Gospel, 
drawn however vividly upon the page of a Book, bid- 
ding the weary and heavy laden come to Him for rest, 
is not enough. The Voice grows dim and inarticulate 
when heard amidst the living voices around us singing 
with passion and excitement, the Form seems cold and 
pale and ghostlike compared with those of warm flesh 
and blood which press upon us on all sides. 

We need more than this, we need the living Pres- 
ence of Him of whom the Gospels speak, alive and 
close to us to-day, to Whom we can turn in the hour 
of need, Whose influence we can feel more potent than 
that of any one on earth. 

And this is given us in the Person of our Lord. 


BLESSED ARE THE CLEAN OF HEART 


2og 


The centre, the life, the mainspring of the Christian 
Faith. 

And yet we are so used to the attraction of imperfect 
humanity, that at first the character of a perfect man 
disturbs and disappoints us. We admire physical 
courage more than moral courage, a certain reckless- 
ness more than self-control, one who loves the things 
of this world more than one who is ready to sacrifice 
all for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake. We have so 
long associated certain faults, even grave sins, with 
our idea of manliness, that a sinless man seems 
almost unmanly. It is a shock to many a woman 
to find the man she loves innocent of certain sins; 
he seems to her lacking in virility. The Christian 
mother, it seems, would love her boy more if he 
struck back than if he turned the other cheek to the 
smiter. 

For in every sphere we need an education to be able 
to appreciate the most perfect. In art and literature, as 
well as in character, the admiration of the multitude is 
given to what is within its reach, that which is faulty 
and imperfect. Perfection is at once a revelation and 

an education. Only those who have studied can ap- 
14 


210 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


preciate the works of the great prophets, the great 
revealers of beauty. 

And only those who study the life of our Lord and 
draw near to Him in close communion and intimate 
friendship see and know in Him the perfect beauty of 
moral perfection. 

We need therefore to correct the false impressions of 
our experience in life by educating ourselves in another 
experience. To realise the marring effect of sin, by 
close intercourse with the perfect type of humanity — 
He who is “ the chief amongst ten thousand and alto- 
gether lovely ”. 

In Nature the impressions of the eye have often to 
be corrected by the deductions of reason. And in the 
spiritual life it is, if possible, even more so. The false 
impressions of life have to be corrected by the clear 
vision of faith. We need a Person to correct the 
influence of persons. A Person whose goodness is 
the most attractive the world has ever seen, to show 
us how deceptive and unreal is the attraction of that 
which is evil. 

The whole ethical teaching of our Lord is, therefore, 
bound up with Himself. He did not come to promul- 


BLESSED ARE THE CLEAN OF HEART 


211 


gate a law, but to reveal a Character. Compare the 
Gospel with the old law and we see at once the differ- 
ence. The law went into the minutest details, forbid- 
ding this and commanding that. There was scarcely a 
circumstance in the domestic, social and religious life of 
the Jews with which the law had not something to do. 
It said “do this and ye shall live”. The ethical and 
spiritual teaching of our Lord is summed up in one 
brief sentence, “ If thou wilt be perfect, follow Me ”. 

They know little of human nature, its passions and 
its weaknesses who can imagine that the teaching of 
Christ can be separated from Himself, and that the 
exalted moral standard which He gave the world would 
long hold sway over men whose hearts were not touched 
by His love. It is not His teaching that changed the 
heathen world into the Christian, it is Himself. “ If ye 
love Me” He said, “keep My commandments.” His 
love is at once the motive and the power of obeying 
His teaching. Let the Personal influence of our Lord 
be removed from the world, and His teaching will 
soon follow. 

And the vivid realisation of His Person as a living 

object of love and source of power can only be kept 
14 * 


212 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


alive by the faithful practice of religion. Our Lord 
in founding the Catholic Church knew human nature 
better than we know it ourselves. He knew that our 
nature is complex and must be reached in many ways 
and through many channels. 

The great doctrine of the Incarnate Christ upon the 
throne of God, the Mediator and the Life of all His 
people, is like a priceless jewel set in precious stones. 
It is surrounded by other doctrines, devotions and prac- 
tices, by which it is brought home to the minds of the 
faithful and kept alive in their hearts. And it would be 
within the truth to say that every one of these doctrines 
and devotions has this, and this alone as its end. 

The minds of ordinary men are unable to hold for 
long the doctrine and purpose of the Incarnation bereft 
of all those truths and devotional practices which sur- 
round it and uphold it, and feed the mind and kindle 
the heart, and make it, acting through many channels, 
a living reality to them. The Blessed Sacrament upon 
the altar, the centre of devotion and the fountain of the 
Church’s strength, forces upon men’s minds, if they 
could forget it, the reality of our Lord’s Humanity 
living still in all its perfection, and teaches us that the 


BLESSED ARE THE CLEAN OF HEART 


213 


Incarnate God is our food. The Mass with all its 
sacred rites teaches the most unlettered the living effi- 
cacy of the Atonement, and brings its infinite power to 
bear upon each individual soul. The Sacrament of pen- 
ance makes once more real to each penitent such scenes 
in the Gospel as those in which our Lord pardons the 
Magdalene and says to the sinful woman, “ neither do 
I condemn thee, go and sin no more, ,, and promises 
Paradise to the penitent thief. The devotion to the 
Blessed Mother of God is not, as some would suppose 
a rival to the devotion to Her Son, it keeps before 
men the reality of the nature which He assumed. 

Christ is in fact everywhere, and in every act of 
His Church-— its central fire, its heart, its life, living for 
Him and by Him, and making His Presence a peren- 
nial source of power to the minds and hearts of His 
people. 

And thus it is through the constant and faithful prac- 
tice of their Religion that those who are called to live 
much in the world get the antidote to its poison, and 
the stimulant that strengthens them against the lower- 
ing influence of its moral atmosphere. They see the 
Beauty of Holiness in the Person of Jesus Christ, and 


214 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


the evil of sin in however charming a guise it may be 
presented. For through the practice of their religion 
our Lord is knit into their hearts and minds, and His 
Person stands out in bold relief against the background 
of the shifting scenes around them. “ Blessed are the 
clean of heart, for they shall see God.” It is this 
purity of heart, this keeping unsullied the ideals of our 
faith, that fits the soul finally for the Vision of God. 
And it is only by ever keeping before us the Vision of 
God Incarnate that we can preserve this purity. 


VIII. 

BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS, 
FOR THEY SHALL BE CALLED 
THE CHILDREN OF GOD. 





























VIII. 

BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS, FOR 
THEY SHALL BE CALLED THE CHIL- 
DREN OF GOD. 

This Beatitude comes not at the beginning, but at the 
end. The office of the peacemaker is not one to be 
lightly assumed by a novice in the spiritual life. It needs 
a long preparation and training. It is the Beatitude of 
the spiritual diplomatist. And the office of the diplo- 
matist demands no ordinary skill and self-discipline. 
Without a very clear knowledge of the principles at 
stake and more than the average knowledge of men 
the diplomatist is pretty sure to fail in his mission. 

And if this be true in earthly things, and when mere 
earthly ends are at stake, it is infinitely more true in 
spiritual things. Only he who has learnt the lessons 
of the preceding Beatitudes will be able to fulfil the 

delicate work committed to him in this. 

217 


218 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


Notice for one moment how they have trained him 
at every point. 

In the Beatitude of poverty of spirit he has learnt 
to estimate things at their true value and to use them 
for their proper end. By meekness he has learnt 
inner self-control. By mourning, not to shrink from 
sorrow and suffering, but to gain through them com- 
fort from on high. By hunger and thirst after justice, 
he has learnt to bring every part of his nature to 
subserve its true end, which is God. By mercy he 
has learnt to blend in perfect proportion compassion 
and justice. By purity of heart to keep before him 
amidst the seductions of the world the true standards 
and aims of the Christian life. 

And after this thorough training he is sent into the 
world as a peacemaker. A peacemaker who is to be 
blessed with the title not primarily of a Son of Man, 
which indeed he must be in the fullest sense of the 
word, but of the Child of God. 

If we analyse the result of his training we shall find 
that it has taught him three things: (i) That God 
must ever come first in the thoughts of man as his true 
end and the end of all created things; that God there- 


BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS 


2ig 


fore must never be sacrificed for any one or any thing. 
(2) He has learnt to know himself, and that he cannot 
live his true life without self-sacrifice and readiness to 
face difficulties whether interior or exterior without 
flinching. (3) And he has learnt to know men, as no 
man can ever know them who does not love them and 
feel compassion for their infirmities. 

Such is the stern and searching, yet withal loving 
school in which the Christian soul is prepared to fulfil 
his office as peacemaker in a world of strife and egotism, 
where men are at war with God, with themselves and 
with one another. He needs indeed to understand 
the principles at stake, to have himself well in hand, 
and to understand as well as to love the wayward and 
passionate nature of the men with whom he has to 
deal. 

It need scarcely be asserted then that this is no 
Beatitude uttered on a natural temperament. On the 
kind of person who would do anything and surrender 
anything for peace. Such a character is often one of 
the most disturbing elements in life. Ready to sur- 
render the most sacred interests and the most import- 
ant principles to escape the trouble they entail. Such 


220 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


people would do well to remember that there are such 
sayings in the Gospels as “ I am not come to send 
peace upon the earth but the sword,” and “ Blessed are 
ye when all men shall revile you and speak evil of you 
falsely for My sake”. 

A lasting peace can only be made on the principles 
of justice and truth. And a war in the cause of justice 
is better than a peace patched up at the cost of prin- 
ciple. Peace is not the only thing worth having in life, 
either in one’s own heart or in one’s relations with one’s 
own family, or with the world. Indeed I doubt if any 
one ever attained in his own heart that peace of God 
which passeth all understanding, till he had fought 
many a battle with himself and brought his rebellious 
nature under the dominion of conscience. There are 
women who give in to eveiything their husbands 
demand, however unjust, unreasonable and irreligious, 
for a peace that is not worth having. Many a mother, 
believing that the only way to keep hold of her son is 
by yielding to him in all that he demands, wonders 
that she seems neither to have held his affections nor 
to have kept her influence over him. 

Therefore the easy-going lover of peace at any cost 


BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS 


221 


will find, not only that such peacemaking brings a bless- 
ing neither from God nor man, but that it is probably 
more difficult for him to bring himself under the law 
of the Beatitude than for one who is by nature a fighter. 
The fighter has in some ways the better instincts of the 
two, for he knows at least that there are things worth 
fighting for, and he is not afraid to face an opponent. 
He who is afraid of war will never be able to make a 
lasting peace. 

Now the peacemaker of the Beatitude knows that 
he can make no terms with sin, nor with anything that 
is false or untrue. On this point there can be no 
surrender to gain the whole world. In the former 
Beatitude he has learnt to keep his standards unsullied 
in the midst of all the lowering attractions of the world. 
If men are to be led to God it is not by lowering the 
standard of right to suit their weakness ; if they are to 
be led to the truth, it must be by their effort to rise 
to the truth, not by tampering with or explaining 
away truths that seem unpalatable. Such compromises 
with the revealed standards of right and truth have 
been made on all sides by religious bodies outside of 
the Catholic Church ; and we see the result — more and 


222 


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more must be surrendered to human passion or human 
weakness, till the religion of Christ becomes emascu- 
lated and enfeebled, its sterner side denied, its mysteries 
explained away, many of its doctrines abandoned. It 
would be a strange thing if the truths of Revelation, 
with their great demands upon men’s hearts and wills, 
commended themselves at once to our lax and un- 
sanctified nature. We naturally rebel against them. If 
they were not far above us they could not lift us up. It 
needs a discipline of the mind to be able to understand 
the things of God, as much as a discipline of the heart 
to love Him and a discipline of the will to obey Him. 

The standards of Art are not lowered to meet 
the tastes of the unlettered mob. They are an educa- 
tion ; they only appeal to those who have naturally an 
artistic temperament, or who have studied them and 
educated their minds so as to be able to appreciate 
and understand them. And so if the character and 
teaching of our Lord could appeal at once in all its 
beauty to men and women of sordid lives and earthly 
standards, it would not be an education. At first 
there are many things that disappoint us, as they 
did His Disciples. When He was challenged : “If 


BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS 


223 


Thou be the Christ, come down from the Cross and 
we will believe,” I suppose some time or other most 
of us have felt that we could have wished He had come 
down and shown His Power. When He said again, 
“Wist ye not that I could even now pray to My 
Father and He would send more than twelve legions 
of angels,” how we have wished that He had. How 
His enemies would have fled before His Face, and 
come back trembling to His Feet. It is only as we 
grow more spiritual, as our character becomes refined 
and purified, that we realise how much nobler and 
more perfect it was for Him to act as He did. Other 
men could not come down from their crosses and escape 
from their difficulties by the ministration of hosts of 
angels, and in assuming our nature He assumed the 
ordinary conditions of human life. 

The deeper, therefore, the study of the Life of our 
Lord, not as an intellectual but as a spiritual study, 
the more we realise its transcendent beauty, its absolute 
perfection. Only as we try to follow His Example do 
we appreciate it. With lower standards and more 
vulgar ideals we may criticise it, find defects in it, 
think it a little tame. One critic finds that He was 


224 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


lacking in patriotism ! that He was lacking in the sense 
of the ludicrous ! As if He came from Heaven to teach 
men things they knew already. But as we seek to 
follow in His Footsteps we realise the faultless moral 
splendour that radiates from His Presence and trans- 
forms the lives of all who follow His example. We 
feel the truth of His words : “If thou wilt be perfect, 
take up thy cross and follow Me ”, 

And it is the same with the Truths of Revelation. 
There are many doctrines which do not appeal to the 
ordinary mind, educated chiefly in the things of earth. 
How can a man believe in hell if he does not believe 
in sin, or if he does not believe in the Incarnation and 
the price that was paid for the world’s Redemption. 
But in the lurid light which the cross throws upon 
sin it is not difficult to see how sin leads to hatred 
of God and of good. The doctrine of the Blessed 
Sacrament is the daily practical teaching of the words 
of our Lord: “As the Branch cannot bear fruit of 
itself unless it abide in the Vine, so neither can 
you, unless you abide in Me”. “As the living 
Father hath sent Me and I live by the Father, even 
so he that eateth Me shall live by Me” But how 


BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS 


225 


can men believe this who are aiming at no standard 
above their own reach, and doing nothing that they 
cannot do without the assistance of Grace. But those 
whose standard is the Life of Christ will find little 
difficulty in believing, nay — the first day of effort will 
show them that they cannot do what is above nature 
without a supernatural power, that to be Christlike, 
Christ must feed them with His own Life. That in 
the words of St. Paul, the Gospel is “ The power of God 
unto salvation ”. A supernatural power to enable us to 
live up to a supernatural standard. 

It would not be difficult to show how closely inter- 
woven are all the doctrines of Revelation. How they 
all hold together and form one whole, like the stones 
of an arch. And that as by removing one apparently 
insignificant stone the strength and stability of the arch 
is destroyed and its final collapse is only a matter of 
time, so by surrendering one doctrine of the faith, its 
unity and coherence is destroyed, and it may be only 
a question of time how long it will hold any sway over 
the minds of men. 

For instance, to many men in the present day the 

doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body seems to be 
15 


226 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


one of little spiritual importance and of grave intel- 
lectual difficulty. Even if they grant the Resurrection 
of our Lord, the idea of the General Resurrection at the 
last day seems one that only burdens the mind with 
difficulty, placing it, as they say — untruly — in direct 
antagonism with the discoveries of modern science in 
regard to matter, and forming a picture which the 
educated imagination finds ludicrous and grotesque. 
Yet St. Paul, ages before the birth of science, commits 
the Church to the position that in giving up the doctrine 
of the General Resurrection it surrenders the whole 
Christian Faith. “ If,” he writes to the Corinthians, 
“ the dead rise not, then is not Christ risen, and if 
Christ be not risen then is our preaching vain and ye 
are yet in your sins .” Some of our modern teachers 
outside the Church do not seem to realise that in ex- 
plaining away the Resurrection in order to remove 
difficulties to faith, and to be in line with scientific 
speculation, in the mind of St. Paul they are giving 
up Christianity. 

The doctrines of Revelation therefore are not to be ac- 
cepted or rejected merely because they commend them- 
selves or fail to commend themselves to the unsanctified 


BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS 


227 


intellect. They are intended to educate the mind, and 
they need at least a certain amount of moral and spiri- 
tual training to appreciate them. “ Spiritual things are 
spiritually discerned” The carnal mind cannot under- 
stand the things of God. 

And moreover it is not beyond the truth to say that 
every doctrine of the Faith has an influence of some 
sort on the formation and perfect development of 
character. Dogma acts as a mighty force behind the 
will. The man with one talent alleged as the reason 
for the failure of his life a conception of the Character 
of God which was in fact an utterly false one — he could 
not serve a God whom he believed to be unjust ! A 
wrong idea in regard to the very subtle and diffi- 
cult question as to the relation of man’s free will to 
God’s foreknowledge has warped the whole character 
of many a man, and has been the excuse to not a few 
for immorality and failure. Upon the doctrine of the 
Eternal Trinity, which seems an abstract and purely 
metaphysical one, depends our conception of the Love 
of God, whether Love be an accidental or essential 
attribute of the Godhead, with all its consequences 
upon the character of man. 


228 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


Therefore any tampering with the doctrines of Reve- 
lation, however excellent the intention and however 
large the charity that prompts it, has a more far-reach- 
ing influence upon life and character than is at first 
perceived. The surrender of one doctrine or one 
spiritual precept of our Lord may, in fact, have the 
result of producing quite a different type of character 
from that which He intended in founding His Church 
to teach and train souls. “ Teaching them,” as He said, 
“to observe all that I command you.” What should 
we think of a man who strove to obey all the com- 
mands except one which he found too hard for him 
and deliberately violated. His character would be 
very different from that produced by obedience to the 
Ten Commandments. 

Therefore the peacemaker who would seek the bless- 
ing of the Beatitude knows that it is better to set the 
world against him, to be hated of all men and falsely 
accused, than, for any apparent good or any immediate 
gain, to forfeit one jot or one tittle of the spiritual 
standard or dogmatic teaching of the Church. Our 
Lord warned us long ago to expect such treatment, and 
that misunderstanding would lead men to believe that 


BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS 


22g 


in killing those who were faithful to Him they were 
doing God’s service. 

The rigidity and changelessness of the Catholic 
Church, in teaching what She claims to be Her mission 
to teach — the Truths of revelation — whether in fact 
She be mistaken or not; Her readiness to lose any 
number of Her followers rather than compromise what 
She believes to be the truth, instead of proceeding from 
a lack of charity, is in principle the very highest charity, 
and though it be no doubt a cause of strife and division, 
has within it the first and most essential characteristic 
of the peacemakers who are to be called the Children 
of God. She knows at any rate and teaches the world 
that there is such a thing as principle, and that She can 
never weigh numbers against Truth and Right. Her 
strength, and, if you like it, Her weakness is this un- 
bending rigidity ; She claims to have a message from 
God to give to men, a message with which She has no 
right or power to tamper for the sake of any results 
however great. If men will accept it in its entirety, 
well and good ; if not, She must leave them. And the 
result is that She presents to the world, torn and tossed 
with doubts and questionings, rent into bodies possess- 


230 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


ing more or less of the truth, one compact mass, bound 
together by one unchanging spiritual and doctrinal 
standard. If She is, as undoubtedly She is, the object 
of hatred and fear to many ; if She is, and always has 
been, the source of many a bitter strife, the cause of 
many a schism, by Her unyielding consistency and 
fidelity to Her trust — She is at the same time the one 
true peacemaker, giving to vast multitudes peace with 
God, peace within their own hearts and a unity amongst 
themselves unknown to all the world. 

And those of us who in our measure and degree 
would carry out the mission and gain the blessing of 
the peacemaker who is to be called the Child of God, 
must follow Her example and be firmly rooted in the 
conviction that for the sake of man there can be no com- 
promise of right and truth — no tampering with the 
standards given by God ; and that the price of peace 
may often be a long period of war, misunderstanding, 
antagonism, revolt. 

But it is not enough to know the changelessness of 
the Truth of God. We must, if we would be peace- 
makers, know man also. If we know God in His 
holiness and purity, we must know man in all the 


BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS 


231 


frailty of his unstable nature. There are men, rigidly 
orthodox, uncompromisingly moral, who have little 
weight or influence with the world. People respect 
them, but do not love them, and still less feel inclined 
to follow them. They radiate forth a cold light that 
chills but never warms. Their influence for good is 
extraordinarily limited considering how upright and 
good they are. There are Catholics who would will- 
ingly die for the faith, who never in their lives won a 
single person to it, who have, on the contrary, repelled 
many from it. What is the matter with such people ? 
I think it is that they are intolerant not merely of 
wrong, but of the weakness and frailty of human nature. 
They do not understand its shiftiness and uncertainty, 
its paradoxes and compromises and inconsistencies. 
They are intolerant of the faults to which they have 
themselves no temptation. The strong do not under- 
stand the difficulties of the weak, the calm-tempered 
high-principled man of cold blood and few passions, 
scorns the poor shabby bespattered life and hopeless 
inconsistencies of one who is inwardly torn this way 
and that by the violence of conflicting passions. The 
sledge-hammer argument, “ This is right, that is wrong ; 


232 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


this is true, that is false — and there the matter ends. 
If you know a thing is wrong, why do you do it?” 
however unanswerable does not either convince or 
convert. There is something else that must be 
taken into consideration. The cry that utters itself 
from the lips of one who knew well the human heart : 
“ The good that I would, I do not ; the evil that I 
would not, that I do “ I cannot do the things that 
I would.” 

This is what such men fail to realise. They may 
know something of God, they may know much of 
truth and justice, uprightness and integrity, but they 
know little of men — of the struggles that precede, the 
remorse that follows, some grave sin. They judge 
things in the abstract. 

And certainly the deed done, the words spoken can 
and must be so judged. The most charitable man in 
the world would be insincere if he tried to prove that 
a lie spoken, or an act of theft committed, were not in 
themselves wrong. But when it comes to the con- 
sideration of the person , it is very different. Many 
things may go to modify the moral guilt of the man 
who did the evil deed. The deed in itself, and the 


BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS 


233 


deed as done by the doer of it, demand very different 
judgments. 

It is by no abstract law that men are to be judged, 
but with all due weight and consideration of circum- 
stance, education, temperament. 

The peacemaker therefore while keeping before him 
the lofty standard of his religion, needs also to know 
the material in which these standards are to be wrought 
out. He must know man as well as God. He must 
have learnt the lessons of the Beatitude of the merci- 
ful, as well as that of the pure in heart. 

He knows that there can be no lowering of the 
ideals set before us by Christ, but he has learnt — 
ah, yes ! in the school of his own bitter experience — how 
hard it is to rise to them, how great is the contrast 
between desire and attainment. And how long it 
takes even to kindle the desire in one who has failed 
deeply ! 

How then can he bring together God’s high de- 
mands and man’s stormy nature with his weakened 
will and dimmed spiritual vision? 

This is the work of the spiritual diplomatist. And 
needless to say it is one demanding the utmost tact 


234 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


and the greatest delicacy of treatment, a combination 
of firmness and gentleness, an entire faithfulness to 
God and a knowledge of man that can be gained by 
nothing but by love. 

He has at once to keep up the standard and to 
deal with great forbearance and patience with those 
whom he would lead onward in the service of God. 
Human nature emerging or trying to emerge from the 
fascination and slavery of sin is very easily frightened 
and discouraged. Men who have lived most of their 
lives in reckless self-indulgence and without a thought 
of God do not, as a rule, like or trust good people, and 
they know nothing about the power of religion ; they 
only feel that religion expects a good deal from them 
and that they have very little to give. 

To ask much of such men in the way of prayer or 
the practices of the spiritual life would be ridiculous, they 
have no spiritual life. To set before them even a high 
moral standard would only frighten them away. Poor 
men, they are fighting naked passions and their own 
savage lusts ; the beast within them which they have 
nourished for years is alive and awake and angry, 
crying out for food. How can one speak to such 


BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS 


235 


men of the great Christian virtues and of the holiness 
which God demands of His children ? And yet it is 
impossible, even for the sake of such as these, to 
tamper with the law of God, or to permit, in the name 
of religion, what is wrong. 

But the peacemaker, with the Divine love and pati- 
ence which he has learnt from his Master, knows how 
to make the greatest sinner at once realise that the law 
of God must be obeyed, that sin is sin, and at the same 
time that God is infinitely patient and long-suffering 
with those who are trying, however feebly and with 
many failures, to do right. It is one thing to say that 
such and such sins must be permitted in certain cases ; 
that human nature is too weak to resist them, and that 
you will only drive people away if you insist upon their 
being given up. But it is quite another thing to im- 
press upon a man who is only just beginning to awaken 
to the claims of God upon his soul, what is wrong and 
must at least be struggled against, and at the same 
time to help him to realise God’s infinite patience with 
those who are struggling. In the one case the standard 
of God is lowered and human nature weakened and 
degraded, in the other the standard is kept up and 


236 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


men are taught through many failures to strive after 
it. 

And I think the Catholic Church succeeds in doing 
this as no other religious body even tries to do it. She 
can lead men on to the highest types of sanctity. 
She can train the contemplative in the ways of mystic 
prayer, and can teach Her great active orders to go 
forth into the world mingling with all sorts of people, 
yet true to their high vocation, with their loins girt, their 
lamps burning and they themselves like unto men that 
wait for the Bridegroom. And She can deal with the 
lowest and most degraded. She knows from whom to 
ask everything, and from whom to expect but little. 
Her religious demands upon Her children taken as a 
whole is very small — less than many other religious 
bodies. Many people outside the Church are scandalised 
at it. But what She demands, She demands not from a 
select few, not only from those who are what are called 
religious, but from all Her children ; and what She de- 
mands She insists upon. In the few religious observ- 
ances which She makes of obligation She is legislating for 
a vast multitude of people of all classes and types and 
nations, many of whom have neither time nor inclina- 


BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS 


237 


tion for much prayer or church-going. It would be 
useless to ask much of many of them, and knowing the 
human heart She knows that it is far better to ask a 
little and insist upon it, than to ask much and get 
perhaps nothing. 

All that is of obligation to every Catholic throughout 
the world is to go to Mass, which takes about half an 
hour, once on Sunday and a few of the greater festivals 
in the year; to go to Confession and Holy Communion 
at Easter, and to abstain from meat on Fridays, and 
to keep certain days as fasts ; and in regard to these 
fasts She gives very liberal powers to Her priests to dis- 
pense those who from ill-health or work, or other good 
reason, would find it difficult to keep them. That is 
all that is of obligation. The minimum which is in- 
sisted upon for all. If a man went to Holy Communion 
every week day he is as much obliged to go to Mass 
on Sunday as if he never went to church through the 
week. The rule is for all , the most religious as well 
as the least religious. Of course She encourages and 
advises a much higher standard for those who are 
capable of it. But this is all She commands and insists 
upon for all Her children. And no one can complain 


2 3 8 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


that it is too much, or that it is beyond his spiritual 
capacity. If too much were demanded a multitude of 
people would feel that they could not live up to it, and 
would not try to do the little that they could. She 
therefore puts the standard of religious observance upon 
which She insists well within reach of the weakest. 

And so She leads many, who would otherwise be 
discouraged, on to higher things. She shows Her deep 
knowledge of human nature and its weakness in thus 
laying down laws of obligation to suit the weakest, not 
the strongest, the least devout, not the most devout. 
Other religious bodies deal primarily with the inner 
circle. They expect too much. The Catholic Church 
in Her wide view takes in the world, and She has regard 
to the hidden longings of the human heart, to the 
power of conscience, the mighty gift of faith, and the 
mystic attraction which Her churches, guarding as 
they do the living Presence of our Lord in their midst, 
exercise upon all who enter within their portals. 

For Her object is to lead men on, to keep them 
within reach of Her power, to make them come, if it 
be but for half an hour in the week, under the influences 
of religion, and beneath the spell of that hidden 


BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS 


239 


Presence which draws all men unto it. Most people 
resent being driven, no one can resent being drawn. 
What is put upon them by authority seems more or 
less of a task. The task therefore is made as light 
as possible, it just obliges them to come from time to 
time within the influence of currents that carry multi- 
tudes on without resistance. 

At the same time the vision which the Church has 
before Her eyes is that of the “ vast multitude which 
no man can number of all nations and tribes and 
people and tongues standing before the Throne of God 
clad in the white robes of perfect purity And with a 
strong faith in the human soul naturally Christian, the 
underlying longing for God, often scarcely understood, 
and with an undying confidence in Her own power so 
to express the religion of Christ that it will lay its spell 
upon the soul if it can reach it, She exercises the gift 
of prudence as to the best way to bring the greatest 
number under its influence. 

And it is the same in the moral life. The confes- 
sionals of the Catholic Church deal with sin as it is 
dealt with nowhere else. There are kept up the un- 
varying standards of right, and yet the weakest and 


240 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


most sinful go away comforted and filled with the 
sense of God’s Mercy and Goodness. The priest sits 
there to minister the law of God and of His Church ; 
on the one hand he represents the inviolable holiness 
of the Divine law, and on the other the infinite mercy 
of our Lord. His education is largely to teach him 
how far he can go on the side of mercy by giving 
Absolution ; what is the very least he can demand of 
the penitent, as a sufficient token of contrition, involved 
as he is perhaps in many complications and under the 
bondage of long-standing habits. And often he cannot 
ask much, he cannot expect much. It takes very little 
to frighten a soul in the early stages of its conversion. 
It is hard enough for one who has gone on deliberately 
for years in grievous sin to believe in God’s readiness 
to pardon and restore him. 

The office of the Priest in the confessional is there- 
fore to awaken the soul to the sense of the grievousness 
of sin, and at the same time, however great the sin, to 
send him away feeling how good and merciful God is. 
He may feel that it is more than probable that it will 
take a long time for habit to yield to self-control, and 
that there may be many lapses while there is at 


BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS 


241 


the time of confession a real earnest desire to do 
better. 

There are many severe comments from outside on 
the laxity of the confessional, and how people are 
allowed to come to confession week after week, while 
they lapse again and again into the same sins 
and show little sign of improvement. But who that 
is a mere onlooker can tell? Who can tell of the 
strength of passion and the force of habit — who but 
the priest who has heard it, can tell of the bitter re- 
morse, of the hopelessness that has reached almost to 
the verge of despair, of the sinner who is so lightly 
criticised. They see nothing but failure, yet there 
may be a growing effort, an awakening hope, a gradual 
realisation of the power of Divine grace which is the 
earnest of final victory. 

Thus the Church acts as the perfect type of the 
peacemaker. And all who follow Her example, by 
unflinching fidelity to the standards of our Lord, and 
infinite patience and toleration of those who are weaker 
and more prone to evil than themselves, will gain the 
blessing of the peacemakers who shall be called the 

children of God. In such persons there will be no 
16 


242 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


weakness, no sentimental condolence of sin, no loss of 
moral fibre. But at the same time there will be no 
harshness towards men, no sweeping condemnation of 
men as individuals or classes. They will always keep 
clearly in their own minds, and make it felt by others, 
that they draw a distinction between sin and the sinner, 
that the sin is always to be judged and condemned 
but the sinner is to be left to the all-wise and all-merci- 
ful judgment of God and to be treated with gentleness 
and charity. For none can tell the secrets of the human 
heart, and the multitude of considerations that may 
modify the guilt of the evil-doer. As the son of God, 
the peacemaker is intolerant of sin ; as the son of man, 
he is full of compassion, long-suffering and of great 
mercy towards the sinner. 

And this effort in the higher sphere will educate 
men in the principles upon which the peacemaker 
must always act in the constant difficulties that arise 
between man and man. 

No one will ever be a peacemaker who is a partizan. 
Those who would make peace must not take sides. 
Their bias will not be towards one or other of the 
parties at strife, but towards justice and right. When 


BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS 


243 


Josue of old had entered the Land of Promise and 
found enemies on all sides, we are told that a mysterious 
Personage appeared to him and stood over against him 
with a drawn sword in his hand, “and Josue went unto 
him, and said unto him, Art thou one of us or of our 
adversaries, and he said, No, but as Prince of the host of 
the Lord am I now come.” Such must be the position of 
the peacemaker. In full sympathy with the difficulties 
on either side, but himself standing with the hosts of 
the Lord for right and justice. If he cannot enter into 
and sympathise with the difficulties on either side he 
will never draw together those who are at strife ; if he 
brings them together by a sacrifice of principle the 
peace is not worth making. Thus even in the mis- 
understandings and differences that arise in earthly 
affairs, it is religion that trains a man in the true 
principles of the peacemaker and fits him for his 
work. 

But there are special difficulties in our own day and 
our own country which call for the work of the peace- 
maker, and which can be but just alluded to. 

We are living at a time when, in spite of much in- 
difference, there is a vast deal of religious earnestness, 
16* 


244 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


and difference of religious opinion, and the air is full 
of controversy and questionings. 

Now under such circumstances the position of a 
Catholic is a very difficult one. For amidst all the 
Babel of opinion around him he has a certainty that 
he has the truth, of a different character and in a far 
intenser degree than that of a member of any other 
body of Christians. He knows in fact that the Catholic 
Church is the pillar and ground of the truth, and in so 
far as other bodies differ from Her in matters of faith 
he knows that they are wrong. 

He knows moreover that there can be no lasting 
peace based on any other foundation than that of truth, 
and that truth and untruth cannot come to terms of 
peace in the human soul. 

But here again he must keep clear in his mind the 
difference between untruth in the abstract and in the 
concrete. The untruth of a false and imperfect system, 
and that held by an individual belonging to the system. 
We must rightly hate and condemn eveiy religious 
system that holds men in the bondage of untruth or 
withholds them from the liberty that truth alone can 
give. But our attitude towards those who belong to 


BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS 


245 


such systems must be very different, if we would act 
as their peacemakers by leading them to the truth. 

r. In the first place, we must be very sure of the 
truth ourselves. We must know well the truth to 
which we would bring them. Know it, not merely with 
a kind of traditional knowledge, from the fact that we 
have been brought up in it from infancy, but clearly, 
definitely, intelligently. We must, so to speak, see all 
round it, so as to be able to meet objections and to 
express it in language that is not exaggerated or likely 
to lead to misapprehension. Many have been kept 
back from a consideration of some doctrine of the 
Catholic Church because they have heard it expressed 
in language that really misrepresents it. The spiritual 
diplomatist must therefore be well schooled in all the 
aspects of the cause which he would plead. 

2. But, secondly, he must know, and not only know, 
but be able, if only for the moment, to throw himself 
into some sort of intellectual sympathy with the position 
of those whom he would win round. 

If he does not know and cannot understand their 
difficulties he will be arguing in the dark, and will 
surely only alienate those whom he desires to win. A 


246 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


great number of people take little interest in the faiths 
of others, they do not understand, nor do they want to 
understand them. Very well. They are quite justified 
in their aloofness. They have perhaps neither the time, 
nor the talent, nor the sympathy that would lead them 
to such studies. But let them keep out of controversy 
and avoid any effort to win these people to the Truth. 
In this department, at least, they have neither the tal- 
ents nor vocation of a peacemaker. And their efforts, 
if they make any, are likely to do more harm than 
good. 

The peacemaker must, if he is to be at all equipped 
for his work, be in sympathy with both sides. He must 
be able to see clearly another’s difficulty, the element of 
truth perhaps enveloped in a vast deal that is untrue, 
to separate the chaff from the wheat, and to preserve 
every grain of wheat, to detect the point where untruth 
has a hold on the mind, and to measure the strength of 
its hold ; to show often that the error that is held is but 
the misrepresentation of a truth. And all this involves 
patience, knowledge and a large-minded sympathy. 

3. And, thirdly, no man can ever act as a peace- 
maker in matters of religious belief who allows his 


BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS 


247 


mind for a moment to entertain a doubt of the sincerity 
of the men with whom he is dealing. 

It is a narrow, hard, uncharitable view of men to 
suppose that because their position seems to you illogi- 
cal and absurd they must themselves realise that it is 
so. It is very difficult to see the inconsistencies of a 
system in which one has been brought up from child- 
hood ; and intelligent, well-educated men who in every 
other department of life are sane and reasonable, in 
religious matters will often be found to have left aside 
all reason. 

To approach a man, therefore, on controversial ques- 
tions, whose good faith one doubts or disbelieves in, is 
to insult him. 

With these qualifications then, the Catholic can go 
forth into the world equipped for the delicate task of 
bringing others under the dominion of the truth which 
shall make them free. 


* 








BLESSED ARE THEY THAT SUFFER 
PERSECUTION FOR JUSTICE’ 
SAKE, FOR THEIRS IS THE 
KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. 

















IX. 

BLESSED ARE THEY THAT SUFFER PER- 
SECUTION FOR JUSTICE’ SAKE, 
FOR THEIRS IS THE KINGDOM OF 
HEAVEN. 

This is the last of the Beatitudes. Its blessing can 
only be gained by those who have lived under the laws 
and attained somewhat of the Blessings of those which 
have gone before. It does not come at the beginning 
of the spiritual life, but only when that life has attained 
its full maturity. There is nothing unreal or bearing 
the slightest taint of unreality in the spiritual life. 
There are no demands upon the soul that are unreason- 
able, or that would endanger its assuming a pose either 
inwardly or outwardly. Its growth is like all healthy 
growths, a gradual development from very small 
beginnings, “first the blade, then the ear, after that the 

full corn in the ear”. It would be absurd for a child 
251 


252 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


to affect the manners and methods of a man in the 
natural order, and it would be worse than absurd in 
the spiritual order. We are not therefore expected 
in our spiritual childhood to manifest the graces and 
virtues that can only be gained by years of effort and 
prayer. 

And it needs a long training in self-control, a deep 
insight into the true meaning and proportion of things 
around us, a charity towards man that never faileth, 
and a paramount love for God to be able to attain the 
blessing that is here offered to the persecuted. 

Therefore for those who have gone but a little way 
on the road to Heaven, and in whom there are still 
apparent many faults of character and who have as 
yet but a very superficial knowledge of themselves, 
to pretend to anything like rejoicing in persecution, 
whether the persecution comes from friend or foe, from 
their co-religionist or those of different creeds, from 
suffering body or tortured mind, would be nothing 
short of unreality and self-deception. If they can gain 
the grace to bear such things with some degree of 
patience and to strive to keep their hearts from bitter- 
ness, they are doing all that can be expected of them, 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT SUFFER PERSECUTION 253 


and give the best evidence of the possibility of attain- 
ing the blessing of the Beatitude in years to come. 
We must know God before we can rejoice in His Will, 
and we must have caught some dim vision of the 
Kingdom of Heaven before we are ready to surrender 
all that this world has to give us and to rejoice in its 
antagonism. 

For there are those strange beings who without a 
doubt take pleasure in the thought of being persecuted. 
Who make their religion and their religious practices 
a source of such disquiet wherever they go that they 
arouse impatient comment and criticism from even the 
most patient, and this they take a secret joy in, re- 
garding it as persecution. They will not allow their 
friends to leave them alone, they lash them into con- 
troversy and antagonism. They like to think that 
they are hated of all men for the Kingdom of Heaven’s 
sake, whereas, as a matter of fact, if they are hated at 
all it is for their inhuman tactlessness, and the last 
thing imaginable that has to do with it is the Kingdom 
of Heaven. Men must be very sure indeed that they 
hate no one before they can expect any blessing from 
being hated of all men, and that they speak no evil of 


254 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


man or of his religious convictions, falsely, before they 
experience any blessing or can rejoice and be exceed- 
ing glad with any hope that such joy comes from a 
heavenly source, when men speak evil of them. It is 
so easy to transfer in our hearts the cause of antagonism 
from our own faults and blunders and bad taste to our 
religion, and to assume the pose of martyrs, when that 
of penitents would be more becoming. It is to be 
feared that there are not a few who make both 
themselves and the Kingdom of Heaven hateful, and 
secretly wonder that their hearts are not suffused 
with the Divine sweetness of the Beatitude of the 
persecuted. 

Personal religion is not a matter to be talked of and 
gossiped about, or to be dragged before the public, 
nor its practices to be flaunted in the eyes of those 
who do not understand it ; it should rather burn in the 
heart as a secret fire that shines in and radiates forth 
from the life. It is like the wind which bloweth where 
it listeth, but men cannot tell whence it cometh or 
whither it goeth. It encircles its true votaries in a 
Heavenly atmosphere that is felt to come from an un- 
known source. The hatred it engenders is not the 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT SUFFER PERSECUTION 255 


hatred that is caused by the patent faults and obtrusive- 
ness of so-called religious people, but the hatred that 
springs from the world’s fear of the supernatural. From 
the sight of lives and virtues that it cannot understand 
and cannot bring down to its level. 

The blessing and the joy therefore which our Lord 
promises to those who are persecuted for justice’ sake 
is not one that draws its consolations from any human 
source. There must be no taint of secret pleasure in 
the fact of being in opposition, or of being misunder- 
stood. No true man likes to differ from those around 
him, or finds the least enjoyment in accentuating his 
difference, on the contrary he rejoices in being at one 
with his fellow-creatures. Any such pleasure in eccen- 
tricity, or in what is sometimes dignified by the name 
of independence, has no relation whatever to the joy of 
the Beatitude. On the contrary the Beatitude springs 
out of human sorrow and distress: “There springs up 
a light in the darkness and joyful gladness for those 
that are true of heart”. It is for those who under the 
compulsion of conscience and driven by the force of 
overwhelming conviction, for the love of God and Truth 
are ready, though with sadness and anguish of heart, to 


256 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


bear misunderstanding and reproach from those who 
are nearest and dearest to them. And to such, in 
their solitude and distress, and growing as it were out 
of the darkness that envelops them, there dawns upon 
them the Heavenly vision flooding the soul with peace 
and the heart with Divine consolation. 

It is such persecution, endured for the sake of Christ 
alone, a persecution of whatever kind brought upon us 
not by our imperfections or want of tact and common 
sense, but by our fidelity to conscience and to God, 
that brings with it the consolation and the joy of the 
Beatitude. It is supernatural in its cause and in its 
effects. 

Be it therefore remembered again that this Beatitude 
is the last, the result of all the training and discipline 
and prayer involved in gaining the blessings of those 
that went before. It is for a soul that has already 
learned to conquer self, to endure suffering and sorrow 
with calmness, to find in God a present help in trouble, 
and to be gentle and loving in a world that is often 
cruel and selfish. He who has not passed through this 
school and learned its lessons will not be able to gain 
the final and crowning reward, the reward of the martyr 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT SUFFER PERSECUTION 257 


in will if not in deed. The man who has grown hard 
and cynical under opposition, or who, however much 
he has suffered in the cause of truth and right, is 
sceptical of the good faith of those who differ from 
him, and loud and harsh in his criticism, and stern to 
himself has become stern to others, also stirs up an 
antagonism that is only natural and merits no super- 
natural blessing. The Beatitude of the persecuted is 
the Beatitude of the Saints, or of those who are very 
near to sanctity. 

Now it may be noticed that there is a close connec- 
tion between this and the first Beatitude. The reward 
in both cases is the same, “theirs is the Kingdom of 
Heaven And the subject-matter of both is the same, 
the external circumstances and surroundings in which 
we live. 

The first is the blessing promised to those who allow 
no external things to master them, but keep them in 
their place as servants and use them as means of ap- 
proach to God. Under the law of this Beatitude we 
see men struggling against the attraction of outward 
things, feeling the need of them and at the same time 
the danger ; how they are forced by the necessities of 

1 7 


258 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


Nature to use them, and yet in their use they run the 
risk of falling under their power. 

But the last Beatitude contemplates a very different 
state of things. It is not against the attraction of the 
creatures that the battle has here to be fought, but the 
reverse. These things that once were loved so much, 
perhaps too much, have as it were risen up against the 
man who strove against their magnetic charm, and 
assaulted him and sought to drive him into revolt against 
God. If they cannot win him they will wound him. 
The servant of God endures the last great onslaught 
from the creatures he sought to make his servants; 
they will master him by fear if not by love. All 
things are arrayed against him. The smile of the 
world that wooed and almost won him has turned into 
an angry frown and its caress into a brutal assault. “If 
thou wilt fall down and worship me all shall be Thine,” 
so said the Prince of this world of old to our Lord ; “ but 
if not, I will raise all in revolt and crush the life out of 
Thee.” 

How different are these trials — the trial of seduction 
and of hatred. Yet he who would receive the full 
measure of the blessings offered by our Lord in the 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT SUFFER PERSECUTION 259 


Beatitudes must endure both. They are the tests of 
untried youth full of the visions of beauty and hope and 
idealism, and of mature years or of one who stands 
upon the threshold of old age. The evening and the 
morning make the little day of each man’s experience, 
and some who have borne well and bravely the testing 
of youth and kept their hearts for God, amidst all the 
attraction of the world, have failed in the evening under 
the crushing blows of the world’s hatred. Yet we must 
endure the testing that comes with both the morning 
and evening ere we can pass on to the rest of the 
Sabbath of a cloudless eternity. 

It is one thing to struggle with the body, alive and 
astir with the warm pulses of youth, lest it should sub- 
due the soul to its servitude, but it is a very different 
thing to find that body no longer a seducer but an 
enemy that shows its claws and fangs. A refined 
instrument of exquisite torture, the brain on fire with 
thoughts that it seems impossible to control, the heart 
faint with weakness, every nerve athrob. The pleasures 
of the senses have failed to seduce, now the body tries 
what pain will do. 

It is one thing to strive lest the absorbing interest of 
17 * 


26 o 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


work should give no time for higher thoughts, it is a 
very different thing to find the work become a burden 
and distress, refusing to get done, hanging like lead 
around the neck — no longer an interest but a weary 
strain. 

Once you fought hard to keep possession of your 
heart, lest friendship and affections should take too 
strong a hold upon you and lead you as they willed. 
It was a noble and a healthy warfare. But now old 
friends have died or gone their way, you have been 
compelled to take a line in life that is not understood, 
and have been pursued by criticism, misunderstanding, 
and opposition ; there is no longer the danger of loving 
men too much, but of the heart, hungry and disap- 
pointed, turning away in bitterness and solitude. 

Even the inanimate things around you seem to have 
gained a life of their own for the purpose of tormenting 
you. The things that gave pleasure give pain, the 
flavour of life is gone. You stand no longer in a world 
that you are trying not to love too much, but in a world 
that has become violently and aggressively antagonistic. 
There is no further danger of its courting, the danger is 
lest you should be crushed under its persecution. 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT SUFFER PERSECUTION 261 


Now it seems strange — it has always been a puzzle 
to devout minds — why such things should be allowed. 
After all, God is the Lord and Ruler of all. It is easy 
to imagine that God’s creation should turn upon the 
man who violates the laws and commands of its Creator. 
But it seems bewildering to one’s moral sense that such 
things should be allowed to happen to a person whose 
only desire is to serve God and to use all to His Glory. 
It is always a puzzle, always a fresh source of trial to 
every soul who experiences it or witnesses it. 

But it is well to bear in mind that while such diffi- 
culties are great indeed, we must not exaggerate them. 
There are many trials and failures that fall to the lot of 
good people which ought not to trouble us as being in 
any way connected with the mystery of God’s dealings 
with man— the fact is, there is really no mystery about 
them at all. The explanation lies in the relation of 
cause to effect. If we see a certain effect we seek at 
once for the cause. And the cause of what is called 
success, worldly prosperity, etc., is not a life of prayer 
or the constant frequenting of the sacraments, but in- 
dustry, hard work, and certain natural gifts. If religion 
were warranted to produce wealth or success, many 


262 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


would become religious to gain these things. The fruits 
of Religion are union with our Lord, victory over sin, 
the vision of God, and the things of the Spirit. But 
there is no necessary connection whatever between 
frequent communion and success on the Stock Ex- 
change, or daily attendance at Mass and a flourishing 
business. It cannot with any reason be said : “ Here is 
a man who goes to Holy Communion every day of his 
life, and yet he fails in every business enterprise — isn’t 
it strange ? ” No, certainly not, his failure is assuredly 
not because he goes to Holy Communion every day, 
but because he is lacking in the gifts that ensure success 
in such matters, or because he does not go about his 
business in the way that warrants success. It would be 
a perilous thing for human life if God were to supply 
through religion the qualifications which are ordinarily 
acquired in the affairs of this life by hard work and 
strenuous effort. “ He that soweth to the spirit shall of 
the spirit reap everlasting life,” but not necessarily the 
best fruits of life on earth. Such fruits are for those 
who lay themselves out to win them by every means 
in their power, sometimes by means that religion for- 
bids and condemns. The Holy Ghost bestows many 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT SUFFER PERSECUTION 263 


gifts upon those who are the faithful servants of God, 
but they are spiritual gifts, and they do not include 
amongst their number those which fit a man to make a 
fortune ; they are supernatural, these others are either 
natural endowments, or acquired by sharp wits and the 
severe training of the market-place. 

Therefore if a man is very devout and very religious 
and utterly unbusiness-like, there is no mystery in the 
fact that in worldly affairs he may eventually fall 
amongst the submerged tenth. We must not look in 
the effect for results that are not in the cause. One 
might indeed just as well, and with equal reason, ex- 
press surprise that a man who devoted his life to the 
acquisition of wealth did not thereby gain great gifts 
of prayer and an intimate knowledge of God. As a 
man sows, so shall he reap. And he who sows and 
labours for a spiritual harvest will as surely — more 
surely — gain its legitimate results, as he who sows and 
labours for worldly prosperity — more surely, for the one 
never fails, the other often does. 

But we may go farther. There is no necessary an- 
tithesis between religion and success in the affairs of 
life. On the contrary, religion trains and develops 


264 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


the whole character, bestowing many gifts which we 
have not by nature, and compelling us, so far as we 
are obedient to its commands, to do with all our will 
and all our power whatever our duty calls us to do. 
So far therefore as the effects of religion are concerned 
they should make a man at his very best all round. 
It will not allow him to be slip-shod or half-hearted in 
what he undertakes. If he is unbusiness-like in the 
affairs of life, it is not because he is religious, but 
because he is not true to the commands of religion 
His religion bids him do it with all his might, do all to 
the glory of God, and God is not glorified by a man 
who brings aspersions upon his faith as making him 
incapable of work. 

It has been often said that one of the causes of the 
lack of prosperity in Ireland is, that the minds of the 
people are so fixed upon the things of the other world 
that they do not think it worth while to do the work 
of this world. I believe such an apology to be the 
greatest and most subtle condemnation of the religion 
of the people of Ireland. It implies that the Catholic 
Faith unfits a man to take his proper place in life, and 
do his duty where God has put him. Or it means, still 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT SUFFER PERSECUTION 265 


worse, that this world with its manifold calls and claims 
to work, is no fitting place of discipline and preparation 
for the next. It is in direct opposition to the whole 
teaching of our Lord and His Apostles. And it implies 
that if a man desires to save his soul and be faithful 
to our Lord he must give up the world and enter a 
convent. 

According to the teaching of the Catholic Church, on 
the contrary, life in the world is the ordinary condition 
of life. The religious life is not an escape from duty 
nor the result of a man’s personal tastes or wishes, but 
the outcome of a Divine vocation. Our Lord legislated 
for the married state, and sanctified matrimony by 
making it a Sacrament, the Church speaks of it as the 
holy state of matrimony. St. Paul speaks of the union 
of the married couple as the type of the union of Christ 
with His Church, and Holy Scripture constantly speaks 
of the Church as the Bride of Christ. We are told 
again of one who having been healed by our Lord 
desired to join that band of followers who left all to 
follow Him, and our Lord’s answer was : “ Go back 
home and tell those at home what great things the 
Lord hath done for thee”. 


266 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


All this involves a life in the world, not the cloister. 
In the Parable of the talents our Lord teaches the very 
practical lesson that the gifts of God are to be de- 
veloped in the strain and pressure of life’s struggle and 
competition, and the man who was punished was he 
who wrapped his talent in a napkin and hid it in 
the earth — the shirker, the incompetent, the sluggard. 
These talents may be taken no doubt as spiritual gifts, 
but they certainly do not exclude natural gifts, and in 
the imagery of the Parable it was in the market-place 
that they were to be developed. 

So far therefore from attributing failure in such 
cases as we have been considering to the effect of 
religion, it is the reverse. The man who is unbusiness- 
like and neglects or scamps the work that duty calls 
him to do, even if he does so to gain more time for the 
practices of religion, suffers not because of his religion, 
but because of some unfaithfulness to it. In proportion 
as a man is really religious he ought to be the best 
man all round, best developed, best fitted for the 
struggle of life, best in whatever position God has 
placed him. One cannot imagine our Lord in the 
carpenter’s shop at Nazareth doing the menial work 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT SUFFER PERSECUTION 267 


He had undertaken in any but the most perfect 
way possible, or that the exaltation of His mind on 
Heavenly things interfered with the lowly work of 
earth. 

Let us therefore not exaggerate the difficulties that 
good people have to suffer upon earth. It is a deep 
mystery that they should have to suffer as they 
do. But let us keep clearly before us the distinc- 
tion between the sufferings that are a mystery, and 
those that men bring upon themselves by their own 
incompetence. 

And it may be well in this connection to remember 
that the Grace of God, and prayer, however earnest, do 
not remedy the evil effects of the violation of Nature’s 
laws, and that a foolish thing done in the service of 
God will ordinarily have just the same bad results as a 
foolish thing done for the most worldly of motives. A 
man who overstrains his mind by too much prayer will 
suffer just as much and in the same way as one who 
overstrains it in business. The motive does not set 
one free from the natural law. Yet there are not a 
few who lay aside all prudence and common sense in 
the name of religion, and wonder that God who sees 


268 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


the motive does not protect them from the disastrous 
results. But God would have us reasonable beings as 
well as spiritual beings, and teaches us, or, if we will 
not learn it, teaches others through us, that the natural 
law and the spiritual law go hand in hand. 

Many therefore who wonder at the mystery of suffer- 
ing would do better if they wondered at their own 
unreasonableness in the practice of their religion, and 
took their sufferings as the lash with which Nature 
seeks to drive them back into the pathway of reason. 

Such sufferings do not come under the law of the 
Beatitude, nor do they receive its blessing ; the persecu- 
tion of an overwrought brain, of a morbid melancholy 
induced by too much introspection, of strained nerves 
and a sickly body, are not always the sufferings for 
justice’ sake, but very often for injustice in violating 
the law of Nature. 

But when all this has been said, and due weight has 
been given to the failures and sufferings that are in- 
duced by natural causes, and that cannot be dignified 
by the name of the Mystery of God’s dealings with 
man, there is enough and more than enough left to 
cause perplexity to the devout mind. Only those who 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT SUFFER PERSECUTION 269 


never think at all, or those who see all things in the 
light of Divine Faith, can fail to be harassed and 
bewildered by the grave moral questions that the con- 
templation of God’s dealings with His faithful servants 
stirs in their minds. 

For the Beatitude contemplates the possibility, not 
merely of failure, or of being worsted in the battle of 
life, but of direct opposition and bitter antagonism. It 
is not negative, but positive. 

Here is a man who has placed himself under the 
laws of perfection, who desires nothing so much as to 
do God’s Will and to live at peace with and be a bless- 
ing to his fellow-creatures, and to do this has undergone 
a long and severe schooling in the practice of self- 
discipline, or as men like to put it nowadays, has 
placed himself in harmony with the laws of the uni- 
verse. And the world rises up against him. It will 
not leave him alone. It refuses to take his offered 
blessings. It opposes, reviles, hates and persecutes him. 
And everything seems to go against him. God’s 
world somehow does not appear to approve of its 
Creator’s friends, and deals more kindly with His 
enemies or with those who ignore him. But those 


270 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


who love Him most and serve Him best arouse opposi- 
tion, contempt and persecution. 

And this mystery though so old always seems new 
to every new sufferer. It comes to him as a surprise 
and disturbs him with perplexities as though it had 
never happened before. That is the keenness of 
suffering, especially suffering through the injustice of 
others. We see it around us, we feel its presence in 
the world, we know it is here, and see its victims 
everywhere. Yet when it comes to me, it seems to 
be something new, never really known before, some- 
thing surprising and intolerable. The complaints that 
have been wrung from the lips of countless multitudes 
come from mine. The words of consolation which I 
have spoken to others sound a mockery to myself. I 
stand alone. There is a sharp edge that cuts me as 
none has ever been wounded before. 

It is good therefore to remember that he who suffers 
in the cause of God and of truth does not, as a matter 
of fact, stand alone. He is one of a great multitude 
that no man can number of all nations and people and 
kingdoms and tongues. Reaching back* through the 
history of the world to the very gate of Eden, when 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT SUFFER PERSECUTION 271 


Abel the first martyr suffered through the narrowness, 
jealousy and intolerance of his brother. 

And the persecutions of to-day, however real, are 
mild compared with those that stain the records of the 
past. The world’s real benefactors have always been 
treated by it as its enemies. When Christ came down 
to show men the way of salvation they nailed Him 
to the cross. When they were offered their choice 
between the greatest Benefactor the world has ever 
known and a thief and murderer, they chose Barabas 
and delivered Jesus to death. And this was but the 
greatest and most awful instance of what the world 
has always done. 

There is nothing more remarkable than the way in 
which men of every age have treated those who came 
to them with any new truth or higher standard of right. 
They have been met not merely with the dead-weight 
of ignorance and indifference but with violent antagon- 
ism. Every forward step in the history of our race has 
been at the cost of bitter suffering and misrepresenta- 
tion, often of the death of those who would lead it 
onward. We do not realise that the commonplace 
truths that rule and enlarge our life to-day had to fight 


272 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


to get a hearing, and that the teachers of those truths 
were reviled, persecuted and hated of all men, and that 
we who enjoy the blessings which they have brought us, 
had we lived in their day would probably have taken 
our part in the opposition. Even in the enlightenment 
and boasted breadth of modern life, many oppose with 
all their might the teachers of those truths which are 
for their welfare. Their eyes are holden that they 
cannot see them. Whether in science, politics, art, 
literature or religion, it has been, and probably will be 
to the end of time, the same. The truths are misrepre- 
sented or misunderstood, and their teachers are treated 
with scorn and surrounded by an atmosphere of sus- 
picion. Some of us live to see our mistake, and look 
back with shame at our misconception of and anta- 
gonism to that which has brought us light, healing 
and liberty. 

The words of our Lord are true in their largest 
sense : “ Your fathers slew the Prophets, and their chil- 
dren build their tombs ”, 

And this opposition has always reached its keenest 
and bitterest form in matters of religion. The odium 
theologicum is proverbial. We may talk as we will of 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT SUFFER PERSECUTION 273 


the spirit of toleration in our own day, but it is scarcely 
worth boasting of. Intolerance may take a less savage 
form, but it is there, nevertheless, and it can be aroused 
to-day as easily as when a few bigoted men, moved with 
envy, stirred the multitudes to demand the death of 
Jesus. Men of no religious convictions are often the 
most bitterly intolerant of those of deep conviction. 
Men who boast loudest of liberty of conscience heap 
ridicule and contempt upon those whose consciences lead 
them to other conclusions than their own, and would if 
they could stamp out all liberty. Here in England in 
the twentieth century in many a Christian home there 
are not a few whose lives are made almost intolerable 
by the petty persecution which they have to endure 
year after year for conscience’ sake. 

Untruth somehow seems stronger — if but for the 
moment — than truth, and wrong than right. There is 
nothing more pathetic in history than the sight of the 
power — the temporary power — of evil over good. In 
the perspective of the ages we see, indeed, the reverse, 
but those who suffered for right and truth had to suffer, 
often die in the darkness ; the reaction came later. The 
strength of truth and goodness lies in its inherent vital- 


274 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


ity; it can bide its time, for it is eternal. When it 
seems slain and trampled under the feet of men, lo ! it 
is alive again, and with all the greater vigour because of 
the opposition. The strength of evil and untruth, on 
the other hand, is the strength of violence and passion, 
and false hopes and promises that are soon exposed. 
Wrong cannot afford to wait ; it knows that it has but a 
short time. Truth and right can wait with the certainty 
that in the long run they must gain the victory. They 
are like the Rider in the Apocalypse, with crowns of 
victory on His head even before the battle has begun. 
The lives of great men and women have suffered at the 
hands of the most worthless. St. John the Baptist is 
slain through the whim of a dancing-girl and the 
spite of an angry woman. The history of the first 
days of Christianity is a history of how the noblest 
lives were sacrificed often to the most sordid and the 
basest passions — jealousy, lust, anger, intrigue, per- 
sonal spite. 

Nothing has been too small or low to employ as a 
weapon against the teachers of Truth and Righteous- 
ness, nothing too weak, apparently, to destroy them. 
And so goodness was driven out by evil, and falsehood 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT SUFFER PERSECUTION 275 


triumphed over Truth, and those who would bless the 
world with the knowledge and gifts that it needed were 
reviled and persecuted. But the generations have risen 
up and called them blessed, and have turned their hatred 
upon their persecutors. 

Those, therefore, who have to suffer in the cause of 
God may take comfort in the thought, that, however 
lonely and isolated they feel, they belong to a vast 
multitude that cannot be numbered — the world’s great 
benefactors whom it has learnt to bless because they 
had the courage to withstand it ; and that as a matter 
of fact it is those who give in to it, whom in the long 
run it forgets or despises. They may encourage them- 
selves therefore with the thought that they suffer from 
a moment’s opposition to be followed by an age-long 
appreciation. 

But however comforting such considerations may be, 
it is not for rewards like these that men will endure to 
the end. 

The reward of the Beatitude is not the possession of 
the Kingdom of Earth, but of the Kingdom of Heaven. 
1 1 is wholly supernatural. The soul that has already 

learnt much in the school of the Beatitudes is being put 
18 * 


276 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


to the last and final test. It is being searched through 
and through by the fire of persecution. If it can stand 
this and rise through it the training has done its work. 
If there be a flaw it will disclose itself. It is the last 
Beatitude, and it teaches us that it is possible for a man 
to stand not only alone, but with all the world against 
him and to be happy. Not because he is indifferent to 
human appreciation and human affection, for that would 
be no virtue, nor because he despises the things of earth, 
for, on the contrary, he reverences and values all that 
God has created, nor yet because he is indifferent to the 
judgments of men, for in the school in which he has 
been trained his heart has become very tender towards 
his fellow-creatures, but because he has turned to God 
as his Comforter, he has learned to see the true value 
and proportion of things in Him. The light of Heaven 
encircles him, and his solitude is enlivened by Heavenly 
companionship. Through the cracking and splitting 
surface of earthly things the light and sounds of the 
Heavenly Kingdom flow in upon him and flood his 
soul with peace, and while the tears of earthly sorrow 
fill his eyes, he rejoices and is exceeding glad. 

The work done under the training of all the other 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT SUFFER PERSECUTION 277 


Beatitudes is tested, completed, and rewarded in this. 
So, as Stephen was stoned, his face was as the face of 
an angel, and he saw our Lord standing at the right 
hand of God. So in the arena, amidst the wild shouts 
of an angry multitude, and under sword and flame and 
rack the martyrs could sing Te Deums and pray for and 
pardon their persecutors. They felt not so much that 
the world was against them as that God was with them, 
and in His light they saw light. 

But the Beatitude has, I think, a wider application. 
There is a persecution which many have to endure not 
from people but from things. 

We know what it is to be in harmony with ourselves 
and with all that is around us, a mind serene and calm, 
a body unruffled by suffering or disturbed by passion, 
the apt and ready servant of the soul, and the external 
surroundings of our life in full accord with our tastes 
and wishes. The inner life and its external circum- 
stances swing in perfect harmony and rhythm. 

Such is often the case in childhood and early youth. 
The sun of a buoyant and vigorous life shines from with- 
in and sheds its radiance on all around us. Hope, like 
the warm breath of spring, stirs through the soul and 


278 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


calls its manifold powers to action, and the world bathed 
in its light bids it come forth and try them. 

And then as time goes on hope becomes dimmed 
and clouded by disappointment. There are jars and 
discords between the inner life and the outer. Con- 
science awakens and forbids many things, and issues 
commands that are hard to obey. Then the harmony 
of the inner life is disturbed. There is strife and dis- 
cord in the very sanctuary of the soul. It cannot do 
the things that it would. The will becomes surly and 
discontented. Inclination calls one way, reason and 
conscience another. Passion, like the first murmur of 
a coming storm, makes itself heard. Soon the light 
and budding life of spring are swept away as it breaks 
with all its fury. Then the body awakes like a giant, 
awakes and wrestles with the soul for dominion, and in 
the fierce conflict the strongest forces of man’s nature 
are arrayed one against the other. The flesh lusts 
against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh, and 
these are contrary the one to the other. An intense 
dualism is set up, and can never be allayed save by the 
subjection of the flesh to the spirit or the spirit to the 
flesh. Action in the external sphere is weakened by 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT SUFFER PERSECUTION 279 


the inner conflict. The very appearance of outward 
things becomes changed and deceptive. The judgment 
is at fault. The light of reason dimmed. The call of 
the outer world is no longer to come forth and do, but 
to come forth to an endless struggle, with the issue un- 
certain. The atmosphere is charged with antagonism. 
The harmony that reigned between the man and his 
surroundings is gone for ever. He is at war with them 
or they with him, he can hardly tell which. Things 
that were a help become a hindrance. Things that 
were a joy to do became a burden and a sorrow. 
Things that crowded upon him and clamoured with 
the offer of their service, take flight and leave him or 
turn and rend him. 

Under such circumstances and in the loneliness and 
desolation in which the soul finds itself, there are two 
offers of help constantly appealing to it. One to give 
up the struggle and find peace by surrender. This is 
the offer from below. The strife and suffering, it says, 
spring from fighting against your own nature and cir- 
cumstances which are too strong for you ; give up the 
fight and you shall have peace. The other comes from 
above. It comes from the Lips of our Lord. It says — 


28 o 


LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 


You cannot fight this battle alone ; you were never in- 
tended to fight alone ; if you will, I will help you. 
Come and learn in the school in which I will teach you 
and give you strength. There you will find the light 
that never fails, the grace that imparts eternal youth 
and vigour. 

It rests with each man to decide for himself, and by 
the issue of that decision he must abide. If he accepts 
the one, he will find peace indeed, but it will be a 
peace purchased at the loss of all that is worth having ; 
he will become a poor drifting willess thing borne 
hither and thither by the currents around him and the 
stronger currents of passion and inclination within. 
If he accepts the other, he must place himself under 
the stern discipline of those laws laid down by our Lord 
in the Beatitudes, the laws of liberty, whereby he will 
become master of himself and of the world around him. 
But in the struggle that this involves he will gain far 
more. He will find the sweet companionship of One 
Who will be ever by his side, Who will lay open to him 
the secrets and the joys of a larger and a nobler life. 
He will rise into the supernatural. He will see, first 
dimly, then ever more and more clearly, the golden 


BLESSED ARE THEY THAT SUFFER PERSECUTION 281 


spires and strong battlements of the Kingdom of 
Heaven, whose walls are salvation, whose gates are 
peace, and in that Kingdom his solitude will be com- 
forted by the Communion of Saints, his weakness 
strengthened by partaking of the very Life of Christ 
Himself, and God will wipe away all tears from his 
eyes. He will experience the blessing of the servant 
of God, the skilled combatant in the battle of life: 
“ Blessed are the persecuted, for they shall be called the 
children of God 


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